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COPYRIGHT DEJPOSHV 



Round the World 
In any number of days 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/roundworldinanynOObari 




MY TICKET IS FOR NEW ZEALAND (page 4) 



ROUND THE WORLD IN 
ANY NUMBER OF DAYS 

By Maurice Baring 



ILLUSTRATED BY B. T. B., VINCENT LYNCH 
AND WALTER J. ENRIGHT 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

(Cfce fiitoet#&e jare^g Cambtibjje 

1914 






COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY MAURICE BARING 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October IQ14 



OCT 26 1914 



©CU388060 



Contents 

Introductory i 

Tilbury: June 21 3 

Bay of Biscay: June 24 n 

Gibraltar: June 28 14 

Naples: June 29 15 

Port Said : July 3 22 

The Red Sea: in July 26 

The Gulf of Aden: July 34 

The Indian Ocean: during the Monsoon 46 

Ceylon: July 51 

From Colombo to Fremantle : July 57 

Fremantle: July 68 

Adelaide : July 71 

Melbourne: July 76 

Sydney: August 2 77 

On Board the Maunganui : August 82 

Wellington: August 10 102 

Near Palmerston : August 20. 106 

Wellington : September in 

roratonga and tahiti : september h7 

Across the Pacific: September 2i-October 3. . . .138 

San Francisco: October 3 144 

New York: October 173 



Illustrations 

My ticket is for New Zealand (page 4) . . Frontispiece 

The Stewards 4 1 

Naples — three impressions 16 , 

From ship's music, as a rule, one can withdraw one's 

attention without difficulty 36 

If G. K. Chesterton had been an Australian ... 42 ^ 

"There is nothing so romantic as food" 62 ■-" 

In Sydney I found the men in the bookstores abnor- 
mally intelligent „ . . 78 

"You mustn't think of a green horse" 90 

A Wellington man turning a street corner . . . 102 
A great quantity of natives swarm on board . . .120 
Very few writers think when they are writing . 148 

The only hansom cab in London 158 

Another turn of the screw and he would break down 176 
Undressing in the berth of an American car is an acro- 
batic feat 184 

Their whole business is to steal other people's bag- 
gage 188 

Trying to get a number at the hotel cecil . . .192 



ROUND THE WORLD IN 
ANY NUMBER OF DAYS 

I BELIEVE there is a school of people who 
say the world is flat. I asked H. G. Wells 
(who ought to know) whether the world was flat. 
He said he thought it improbable (mark the scep- 
ticism of H. G. Wells!), but he said the proofs 
generally given of the world's roundness were 
bosh. The dogmas of science go round and round, 
from reaction to progress, and from progress to 
reaction, like the dogmas of medicine. One has 
only to remain very conservative to find one's 
self a revolutionary. "But," some one may say, 
"whether the world is round and you are going 
round it, or whether it is flat and you are going 
across (or along?) it, that is no reason for de- 
scribing your voyage — nowadays a hackneyed 
affair; you might just as well describe a journey 
round the Place de la Concorde or Trafalgar 
Square." 



Round the World 



My answer to this is, I might. But all journeys 
differ with the differing traveler. I write partly 
to please myself, partly in the hope of pleasing 
others, and partly in the hope (a pious hope) of 
gain. 



Tilbury: June 21 

There is a dock-strike going on : but the lead- 
ers say this has been defeated; the newspapers 
say it is over. I reach Tilbury Docks by noon of 
Friday, June 21. There, evidences of a strike are 
manifest in the shape of a local body of special 
police. The porter who wheels my luggage 
points them out and alludes to them in vivid and 
disrespectful terms. He says they are a pack 
of — you know the rest. 

I am sailing in one of the Orient ships: one of 
the big ones, twelve thousand tons or so. 

As soon as I get on board the lift-boy assures 
me that there are only eight old hands on board 
— all the rest have struck. 

" But who are the new hands? " I ask. " Casual 
amateurs?" 

"Oh! just any one we would get," he says. 

It turns out that five hundred members of the 
police have been on board the ship for a week. 



4 Round the World in 

Coaling has been carried out with the utmost 
difficulty. Most of the new stewards have never 
been to sea. Nobody knows where anything is. 
The steward in the smoking-room does n't know 
where the materials for liquid refreshment are 
concealed. 

"But will they be found before the end of the 
voyage?" I hear a man inquire in some trepi- 
dation. 

The steward says they will. There is a sigh 
of relief, and soon we are steaming down the 
Thames. I shall be in the ship till we reach Aus- 
tralia. My ticket is for New Zealand. 

There is a sense of delicious independence and 
freedom from the fretting ties of everyday life 
when one starts on a long journey in a big liner. 
And, watching the lights of Brighton flashing in 
the night, I murmur to myself the words of the 
hymn : — 

"Peace, perfect peace, with loved ones far away." 

Somebody ought one day to write the epic of 




THE STEWARDS 



Any Number of Days 5 

Brighton, just as Mr. Arnold Bennett has written 
the epic of the Five Towns. Arnold Bennett has 
given us pictures of Brighton, it is true; and as for 
Sussex, no county has such a crowd of enthusi- 
astic poets to sing its praise. But when I hear 
the word Sussex spoken, the picture it evokes 
for me has nothing to do with any of that lyrical 
enthusiasm. 

I see a third-class railway carriage on a Mon- 
day morning full of bluejackets. They are travel- 
ling to London from Portsmouth. We have just 
left Horsham. One of them is looking out of the 
window; he observes a man sitting on a stile. 
"Nice easy job that bloke's got," the sailor ob- 
serves, "watching the tortoises flash by." 

All this is suggested by the sight of Brighton 
where, at this very moment, while I am setting 
out to wander with the antipodes (the expression 
is Shakespeare's), I know that two friends of 
mine are dining in that most comfortable of inns, 
the Royal York Hotel. I wish I were there. . . . 



6 Round the World in 

While thus meditating on absent friends, some- 
body asks me if I play bridge. I say Yes. 
"Why did you say Yes?" I say to myself, 
groaning inwardly as I sit down to play. "You 
know you can't play properly and that you'll 
spoil the game." 

Sure enough I revoke in the first game. How- 
ever, in my prophetic soul the comforting thought 
arises that I shan't be asked to play again. 

The next morning by breakfast time we have 
almost reached Plymouth. I know the coast we 
are passing between Bolt Head and Wembury 
Point, having been brought up in that little 
corner of land. I played on those beaches as a 
child, picnicked on those cliffs, played at robbers 
and smugglers in those caves. It is like a piece of 
a dream to see these familiar, these intimate rocks 
and cliffs, after so many years. 

The sea has that peculiar glitter as of a million 
golden scales, and the sky has something peculiar 
in the quality of its azure, something luminous, 



Any Number of Days 7 

hazy, and radiant which seems to me to belong 
to the seas of South Devon, and to the seas of 
South Devon alone. 

Is this really so? Does it, I wonder, strike other 
people in the same way? Or is the impression I 
receive due to the unfading spell and the old 
glamour of childhood. 

There is a ruined church nestling in the rocks 
right down by the waves; there are the paths, 
and the pools, which were the playground of 
hundreds of games, and the battlefields of mimic 
warfare, and the temples of the long thoughts of 
boyhood. 

There are the spots which to childhood's eye 
seemed one's very own, a sacred and permanent 
possession, part and parcel of that larger entity 
of home which was then the centre of one's uni- 
verse, and seemed to be indestructible and ever- 
lasting. 

And now ! Thirty years after, I have no more to 
do with it than any of my fellow passengers in 



8 Round the World in 

this ship. The place is there, the place is the same, 
but I am divorced from it. There it is, in sight and 
almost within reach, but I no longer belong to it. 
It is far away, a part of the past, a part of the ir- 
revocable, a fugitive facet in a kaleidoscope of 
memories and dreams. 

If the world of romance be divided into prov- 
inces, each having its capital, Plymouth is cer- 
tainly the capital of that region in the romantic 
world of England which concerns the sea. And the 
last twenty years, which have made such fearful 
havoc among so much which was characteristically 
English, have spared Plymouth. Plymouth still 
smiles over the Sound — between the luxuriant 
wooded hills of Mount Edgecombe and the forts 
of Statton Heights, crowned in the distance by 
the blue rim of Dartmoor. Little cutters, with 
their spotless sails, are racing in the Sound ; two 
torpedo destroyers are dressed because it is Coro- 
nation Day; a German liner has arrived from 



Any Number of Days 9 

New York. Everything is just the same as it 
used to be thirty years ago. 

Just before sunset a real Devonshire shower 
comes on, veiling the hills in a gray mist, but the 
sun, only half hidden, silvers the waters. Then 
the rain drifts away, and the sun sets in a watery 
glory of gold and silver, and as the twilight deep- 
ens, threatening and cloudy, all the lights begin 
to twinkle on the Hoe. 

There are always a lot of lights in Plymouth, 
but there are more than usual to-night, because 
the city is illuminated. We steam past the break- 
water. The Eddystone Light appears and van- 
ishes intermittently far ahead, and behind us 
Plymouth is twinkling and gleaming and flashing. 

"Yarnder lumes the Island, yarnder lie the ships, 

Wi' sailor lads a-dancin' heel-an'-toe, 
An' the shore-lights flashin', an' the night-tide dashin', 

He sees it arl so plainly, as he saw it long ago." 

These lines of Newbolt's, from his poem, 
"Drake's Drum," ring in my memory and seem 



io Round the World 

now and to-night intolerably appropriate. It 
begins to drizzle once more, and I feel the well- 
known smell of the West Country rain all about 
me, and the years slip by, and the past rises from 
its tomb, sharp and vivid as the present. ... I 
see it all so plainly as I saw it long ago. 

All at once forward in the steerage, a party of 
Welsh emigrants start singing a wailing Celtic 
chorus, piercingly melancholy, alien and strange, 
and this chases away the dream, and reminds me 
that I am on a liner bound for Australia, and 
that it's raining, and I determine to seek the 
smoking-room. 



Bay of Biscay : June 24 

Somebody ought to start a series called 
"Books by Bores for People who Really Want 
to Know." 

These books would contain that particular 
information which you need at particular times 
and seasons, but which you cannot bear to have 
imparted to you at any other time. Information 
about the conditions of life on board different 
liners, for instance. If somebody begins to tell 
you about this when you are not going on a jour- 
ney and he has just returned, you withdraw your 
attention and think of Tom Thumb, as Dr. John- 
son did when people talked of the Punic Wars; 
or, if you are on familiar terms with the inform- 
ant, you tell him to dry up. But when you are 
yourself starting on a journey, that is just what 
you want, in choosing your line and your steamer, 
and just what you can't get. Nobody knows. It 
appears to be a dead secret. I am not going 
to give a particle of that information here, — 



12 Round the World in 

I know the result too well. Any digression on 
any general subject, say the claims of Christian 
Science, or the merits of Harry Lauder's songs, 
would be tolerated, but not that; because those 
things are topics, and this other thing is instruc- 
tion. Neither children nor grown-up people can 
bear to be instructed. Children have to submit 
to it, until the general Children's Strike occurs. 
Grown-up people need n't and don't, and if peo- 
ple insist on instructing them, they either kill 
them, as the Greeks killed Socrates, who was a 
schoolmaster abroad if ever there was one ; or they 
put them in Coventry and isolate them by not 
listening, as the House of Commons did to Burke 
and Macaulay; or they damn them by saying, 
"So-and-so knows a lot, but he is a bore." It 
need only be said once. The man is done for. 
He has quaffed an invisible and intangible poison 
more deadly than hemlock. He is a social leper. 
His approach is like a bell. Wherever he goes, he 
makes a desert. He can call it peace, if he likes. 



Any Number of Days 13 

That is why I shall say no word about the ar- 
rangements, the huge qualities and advantages, 
of the steamers of the Orient line. 

But to go back to the Series of Books by Bores 
for People who Really Want to Know: I would 
suggest the following subjects: — 

A Book telling you (A) whom to give tips to, 
and how much, in country-houses and hotels 
in all the countries of the world. 

And (B) how much to public men, men of 
business, and like officials, anywhere. 

Section (B) would be good reading if written 
by an expert, because the art of tipping or brib- 
ing a Prime Minister is no doubt a delicate one, 
and though one hears so much about the terrible 
bribery and corruption in many countries, one 
so rarely meets any one who has actually himself 
tipped or bribed either a rich Banker, a Magis- 
trate, a General, an Archbishop, or a Minister 
for Foreign Affairs. 



Gibraltar : June 28 

Most people have been there. For those who 

have n't : — 

"It looks 
Exactly as it does in books." 

We stop there only three hours. 



Naples : June 29 

One often hears people say that Naples is 
"disappointing." The disappointment depends 
on what you expect, on your standard of com- 
parison, and on the nature of the conditions 
under which you see Naples. 

There was once upon a time an Englishwoman 
who came out to Rome to live there. She was 
the wife of a scholar. She was asked by one of 
her compatriots whether she liked Rome. She 
said it was a great come-down after what she 
had been used to. 

"And where," asked the second English- 
woman, "used you to live in England?" 

"Surbiton," she answered. 

Have you ever seen Surbiton? It is a small 
suburban town on the Southwestern Railway, 
about half an hour's distance by rail from Lon- 
don. 

Well, if you go to a place like Naples and you 



16 Round the World in 

expect to find a place like Sheerness, you will 
be disappointed. 

Then as to the conditions. These depend on 
the weather; and I know by experience that the 
weather at Naples can make disappointment 
a certainty. The first time I went there it rained. 
That was in spring. The second time I went 
there it snowed. That was in winter. The third 
time I went there I chose the 'month of May so 
as to insure good weather. There was a thick 
fog the whole time. You could n't even see 
Vesuvius. Nevertheless I persevered and went 
there a fourth time, and was rewarded. This 
time I found the proper weather for Naples. It 
is broiling hot, with just a slight sea-breeze. 

It is St. Peter's Day, consequently I antici- 
pated that the shops would be shut. I spoke my 
fear to one of the talkative and gesticulative 
guides who boarded the ship. 

He said No. 

"But it's 'festa,'" I said. 
















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NAPLES — THREE IMPRESSIONS 



Any Number of Days 17 

"St. Peter," he answered with a sniff; "St. 
Peter's the patron Saint of Rome, but here, 
no!" — and he made a gesture of indifferent 
contempt, which no man can do so well as an 
Italian. "We've got St. Januarius," he added. 

St. Peter, he gave one to understand, was, as 
far as Naples is concerned, a very secondary- 
person, a poor affair. And this is odd, because 
St. Peter was a fisherman, and Naples is a city 
of fishermen. At Naples St. Januarius over- 
shadows every one and everything which is con- 
nected with the Life Sacred: besides the fact of 
having a miracle that works plumb, and to 
which the unbeliever bears witness. 
. Some of the shops were shut, some were 
open. The churches were decorated with red 
hangings and crowded with people — old fisher- 
men, decrepit women, quantities of children and 
young women, and some smart young men in 
white ducks and flannels. 

I hold that in many ways Naples is the most 



18 Round the World in 

characteristic, the most Italian, of all Italy's 
cities. It is the most exaggeratedly Italian of 
them all. L'ltalie au grand complet. It is there 
you see the bluest of blue skies, the yellowest 
of yellow houses, where you hear Italian talk 
at its most garrulous, Italian smells at their most 
pungent, and Italian song at its most nasal sen- 
timental pitch, those squalling, pathetic, implor- 
ing, slightly flat love songs, the best of all love 
songs, because they express real love without 
any nonsense, plain love, unendurable, excru- 
ciating love. 

" Excruciating " is the word. It is the love Ca- 
tullus sings of in one of the shortest of poems : — ■ 

"Odi et amo, quave id faciam fortasse requiris 
Nescio sed fieri sentio et excrucior." 

I hate and I love ; and if you want to know how 
that can be, I can't tell you, but I feel it, and I 
am excruciated — that is to say, I am in agony. 
I imagine Catullus living at Naples and sailing 
on the bay in his yacht (phaselus Me) and going 



Any Number of Days 19 

out to dinner and drinking too much wine, and 
being witty and sometimes insolent to important 
people such as Julius Caesar, and squalling love 
songs, bitter-sweet, desperate, passionate songs, 
in the gardens of his Lesbia, whose real name 
was Clodia. 

\ She was the wife of a politician called, I think, 
Metellus Celer, and the professors say she was 
very, very bad. I don't trust the professors. I 
don't believe they know what the Romans, and 
especially the she-Romans, were like. I distrust 
their knowledge. But I trust Catullus's verse, 
and from that it is evident that he was very 
much in love, indeed, and very unhappy. 
Wretched Catullus, as he calls himself. And she, 
Lesbia, did n't care a rap. And in his misery he 
calls her hard names, which were probably well 
deserved. The note you hear in his poetry is the 
same you get in certain Neapolitan songs you 
hear in the street. You can get them on the 
gramophone, sung by Anselmi. 



20 Round the World in 

"At Florence," according to an Italian say- 
ing, "you think; at Rome, you pray; at Venice, 
you love; at Naples, you look." There is plenty 
to look at, especially in the evening, when 
Vesuvius turns rosy and transparent and the 
sea becomes phosphorescent; and plenty even 
in the daytime, when you watch 

"The blue Mediterranean where he lay 
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams 

Beside a pumice isle in Baise's bay, 
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers 

Quivering within the wave's intenser day, 
All overgrown with azure moss and flowers." 

The poets do hit it sometimes. And that is 
an exact description of Capri. It quivers in the 
wave's intenser day. As you drive along to 
Posilippo, the hills of Sorrento seem like phan- 
toms; the vegetation on the hill is gorgeously 
luxuriant and green ; you pass donkey carts laden 
with bright-coloured fruits; the driver carries 
a huge yellow or green parasol; every now and 
then somebody shouts; trams whistle by. It is 



Any Number of Days 21 

hot, swelteringly hot, but freshness comes from 
the sea. Vesuvius is dormant, but crowned by 
a little cloud which pretends to be an eruption 
and isn't. 

You are glutted with sunshine and beauty 
and heat and colour. This is Italy, the quintes- 
sence of Italy, a panorama of azure, and sun, 
and dust. To-day, in any case, there is nothing 
disappointing about it — and I wish I were going 
to bathe in the reaches near Posilippo, and to 
sail in a boat at night and listen to the squealing, 
love-sick Neapolitan songsters. 

When I get back to the ship, the passengers are 
all looking on at the boys diving for pennies, and 
carefully distinguishing between copper and sil- 
ver, under the sea; till at last we leave behind 
the noise, the chatter, and the importunate 
vendors who want to sell you opera-glasses for 
almost nothing, and steam past Vesuvius, Sor- 
rento, and Capri, away into the blue Mediter- 
ranean. Addio, Napoli. 



Port Said : July 3 

We call for the mails at Taranto and then 
nothing happens till we get to Port Said — ex- 
cept that the stewards who had never been to 
sea before have recovered from seasickness, and 
the passengers are all well enough now to organ- 
ise games and competitions in order to break the 
monotony, or to mar the peace (whichever you 
like), of the voyage. 

At Port Said we coal. Black men do it, sing- 
ing the whole time. When one has seen the black 
men coal at Port Said one realizes how the 
Egyptian pyramids were built. I don't mean how 
the engineering was done, but the kind of way 
in which the people who had to make bricks 
without straw set about it; for in the East no- 
thing changes. 

Conjurers and fortune-tellers come on board. 
I have my fortune told. I am amazed by the 
accurate description of my character and the 



Round the World 23 

probability of the foretold fortune, until a friend 
of mine has his fortune told, and on comparing 
notes, we find the man told us word for word the 
same thing about our characteristics and fortune, 
past, present, and future. On reflection, I see 
that the way to tell people's character is to have 
one list of characteristics and to use it for every 
one without the slightest variation. It is bound 
to succeed. For instance, supposing Falstaff 
and Hamlet had their fortunes told by this 
Nubian, I imagine he would have told Ham- 
let's character as follows (I assume Hamlet and 
Falstaff to be on board incognito) : — 

You are not so fortunate as you seem. You 
have a great deal of sense, but more sense than 
knowledge. You can give admirable advice to 
other people. Your judgment is excellent as 
regards others, but bad as regards yourself. 
You never take your own good advice. You are 
fond of your friends. You prefer talk to action. 
You suffer from indecision. You are fond of the 



24 Round the World in 

stage. You are susceptible to female beauty. 
You are witty, amiable, and well educated, but 
you have a weakness for coarse jokes. You are 
superstitious and believe in ghosts. You can 
make people laugh; you often pretend to be more 
foolish than you are. At other times you will 
surprise people by your power of apt repartee. 
Your bane will be an inclination to fat which will 
hamper you in fighting. You are unsuccessful 
as a soldier, but unrivalled as a companion and 
philosopher. You will mix in high society, and 
have friends at Court. You will come off badly 
in personal encounter, and your final enemy will 
be a king." 

Now, imagine him saying exactly the same 
thing to Falstaff. Does n't it fit him just as well? 
Can't you imagine Falstaff saying, "He has hit 
me off to a T," and Hamlet murmuring, "My 
prophetic soul"? In fact, I believe the profes- 
sion of a fortune-teller, after that of a hair-special- 
ist, to be the finest profession in the world, and 



Any Number of Days 25 

the easiest. In the first place it is almost impos- 
sible to prevent the patient from telling you the 
whole of his past and present of his own accord; 
and even if he does n't do this, a little deft cross- 
examination involved in a mass of vague gen- 
eralization will extract a good deal. 

This particular Nubian in the course of the 
process asked me my age, my profession, whether 
I was married, what my financial prospects were, 
and whether I had any children. However, I 
refused to answer questions; but I very nearly 
did once or twice, so insinuatingly were the ques- 
tions put. I further tested the process by having 
my fortune and character told by a second seer, 
and he said exactly the same things as the first 
had said, and I afterwards found out that he 
also had said exactly the same thing to some one 
else. 



The Red Sea : in July 

The first day you say it is pleasant. The sec- 
ond day you say the stories about the heat you 
have heard are gross exaggerations. The third 
day you feel the heat ; and the fourth you realize 
that you are morning, noon, and night in a Turk- 
ish bath that has n't got a cooling-room. And 
yet the energetic played cricket and quoits. , 

One morning (quite early in the morning) a 
tragedy happened. One of the stokers, a Maltee, 
went mad, owing to the heat, and jumped over- 
board. The steamer stopped, but nothing could 
be done. The sea is full of sharks. 

The air is full of little particles of dust which 
makes your hair gritty. The best way to spend 
one's time is, I think, to remain obstinately 
motionless in a chair, dressed in the lightest of 
clothes, and to read novels, stories which engage 
without unduly straining the attention. 

How grateful one is on such occasions to 



Round the World 27 

the authors who have written books of that 
kind! 

Somebody once said that there were books 
which it is a positive pleasure to read. To my 
mind the most precious of all books are those 
which seem to do the work for you. You don't 
have to bother; you are not aware that you are 
reading. Nobody could say this of the works 
of George Meredith or of Henry James. You 
may be interested, delighted, and moved, but 
you know you are reading. 

Anthony Trollope and William de Morgan 
do the work for me, personally; so do Victor 
Hugo, George Sand, Count Tolstoy, and Rud- 
yard Kipling. 

Then there are books which one can't stop 
reading. To this class belong, in my case, the 
works of Dumas: "Monte Cristo," "La Reine 
Margot," and the many volumes which tell of 
the Musketeers. 

"Monte Cristo" is the only book which for 



28 Round the World in 

me has ever annihilated time, space, and place, 
and everything else. 

I read it at school at Eton, on a whole school- 
day. At three you had to go into school, which 
lasted till four. I began reading, or rather flew 
back to my book, as soon as luncheon was over, 
about half past two. I had just got to the part 
where Dantes is escaping from the Chateau 
d'If. I sat reading in a small room in my tutor's 
house. A quarter to three struck; three struck; 
Dumas silenced those bells, whose sound your 
whole unconscious self, as a rule, automatically 
obeyed. You could n't forget that sound if you 
wanted to, any more than a soldier forgets the 
bugle-calls that mark the routine of the day, or 
the sailor forgets the boatswain's whistle. The 
sound is in his flesh and bones as well as in his 
ears. Nature responds to it automatically, un- 
consciously. 

But the sound of the clock striking three es- 
caped me; and the clanging echoes of the school 



Any Number of Days 29 

clock chiming the quarters struck in vain for 
me through my open window on that June after- 
noon: and a quarter past three, half past three, 
and quarter to four. I may have heard, but I 
heeded not; my mind was far away. Now to 
shirk school altogether was an unheard-of thing. 
You could do it in the early morning and say 
you were ill, and "stay out" under the protec- 
tion of the matron, who always certified that 
you were ill. (Who knows? it might be measles!) 
But if you shirked afternoon school, it meant 
probably writing out four books of "Paradise 
Lost. " A little time after the quarter, the boys' 
maid came into my room and asked me what- 
ever I was doing. I was brought back from the 
Chateau d'lf, and my heart stopped still. I raced 
downstairs, across the street to the schoolyard, 
up the wooden stairs into the old Upper School, 
where beneath the busts of famous old Eton- 
ians, our little lessons dribbled on. I found 
school just over, and oh! miracle of miracles! 



3<d Round the World in 

my absence hadn't been noticed! In every 
division there was a boy called the Praepostor 
whose duty it was to see that every boy was 
present at chapel and in school (that is to say, 
in the various classrooms). The office was held 
for a week by every boy in the division, in turn. 
If you were absent, he had to find out whether it 
was due to certified illness or whether you had 
any other reasonable excuse. If not, your name 
went in to the Head Master. He had n't noticed 
my absence, nor had the master, and I walked 
away with the other boys as though I had been 
there all the time instead of at the Chateau d'If. 
I sometimes think that perhaps the spirit of 
Dumas impersonated me during that hour in 
Upper School, so that my rapture in reading 
of Dantes's escape for the first time might be 
complete, perfect, and uninterrupted. If Dumas 
could make one forget the chimes of the school 
clock at Eton, he could make one forget any- 
thing. 



Any Number of Days 31 

Another book which has (in addition to many 
other glorious qualities such as poetry, pathos, 
and passion) the same riveting power is, to my 
mind (if you skip the historical dissertations), 
Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables." Mr. Basil 
Thomson says it is the favourite book of the con- 
victs in Dartmoor Prison, and that they call it 
" Less Miserable." It is a favourite book among 
the Russian peasants also — among those who 
read and write. So is, as a matter of fact, " Monte 
Cristo." Most literary critics say the latter part 
of " Monte Cristo " is a pity. Not so the Russian 
peasant, and not I. The proof is in the reading. 
Whoever heard of anybody not finishing " Monte 
Cristo," and stopping halfway, bored ? 

In reading what Mr. Basil Thomson says of 
the books liked and the books disliked by the 
prisoners in Dartmoor Prison, I was startlingly 
reminded of what I had heard and seen myself 
of the literary taste of the Russian peasants. 

They both dislike books which are "full of 



32 Round the World in 

lies" (including many excellent modern stories). 
"Monte Cristo" has the seal of romantic truth. 
I met a man in a steamer later on in my journey 
who said that "Monte Cristo" was the best 
book in print. I agree. 

In the Red Sea it was almost too hot to read, 
and I murmured to myself those lines from 
H. Belloc's epic, "The Modern Traveller":—- 

"O Africa, mysterious land, 
Surrounded by a lot of sand — 
Far land of Ophir, mined of old 
By lordly Solomon for gold, 
Who sailing southward to Perim, 
Took all the gold away with him, 
And left a lot of holes: 
Vacuities which bring despair 
To those confiding souls, 
Who find that they have bought a share 
In desolate horizons where 
The Desert, terrible and bare, 
Interminably rolls." 

Perim we passed in the night, and then there 
suddenly came a moment when it got cooler. 



Any Number of Days 33 

We had turned a corner and the breeze began 
to blow. A hot breeze, but a breeze. And it's 
something even to get a hot breeze after four days 
and four nights in a Turkish bath. 



The Gulf of A den : July 

Everybody up to now has been vaguely dis- 
cussing what kind of monsoon it would be. The 
most dismal prophecies were made. We were told 
it would be very rough, very hot, and very wet. 
As it turns out, it is not rough, not wet, but 
still hot: steamy and damp, that is to say. 

I now feel as if I had been all my life on board. 
The passengers, the officers, and crew seem to 
be the only people in my universe; the rest are 
shadows and dreams. There are not many pas- 
sengers on board. People fight shy of the Red 
Sea and the monsoon in July. I think they are 
wrong. There are just enough people for com- 
pany and not too many for comfort. There is 
a pleasant variety of passengers ; a few Austral- 
ians, two Germans, a Frenchman and his wife, 
an Irishman, — once a mining expert and now 
a professional painter who paints bold and cap- 
able landscapes in oil, full of colour and light, — 



Round the World 35 

a Scotch family, a High Commissioner (what- 
ever that may be), an American lady singer, a 
missionary, and two young North-Country Eng- 
lishmen. 

If one travels for over a month on a liner, 
one's fellow passengers sometimes may become 
something more than what Bourget calls profits 
perdus: meaning the chance acquaintanceships 
of the table d'hote and the railway train. In a 
steamer one can, if one chooses, get to know 
people really well. 

Every evening a small crowd play whisky 
poker for cocktails; after dinner there is a good 
deal of bridge ; sometimes some music. But from 
ship's music, as a rule, one can " withdraw one's 
attention" without difficulty. 

I am told a good deal about Australia and 
the Australians by people who have been back- 
wards and forwards. They agree to its being a 
splendid country, full of openings for the emi- 
grant. "In Australia," some one tells me, "peo- 



36 Round the World in 

pie don't ask you for references. If you ask for 
a job they give it you, and as long as you show 
you can do it, they let you do it, and as soon as 
you show signs of not being able to do it, they 
fire you out." 

That is, indeed, a different system from what 
obtains in the mother country, where references 
are regarded with awe, and where a thousand 
small side issues often contribute not only to a 
square peg remaining in a round hole, but to an 
utterly hopeless peg remaining in any kind of 
hole. 

One also hears that the Australians (a) resent 
criticism on anything Australian; (b) are very 
critical of what they see in other countries. 

What irritates the Australians, no doubt, and 
what justly irritates them, is when globe-trotters 
rush round the country in a few days and then 
write a book of critical impressions. In England 
(and in America, I should think) the people 
have got over being irritated by that particular 




FROM SHIP'S MUSIC, AS A RULE, ONE CAN WITHDRAW ONE'S 
ATTENTION WITHOUT DIFFICULTY 



Any Number of Days 37 

form of literature. They don't care. If a visitor, 
after spending a fortnight in England, writes a 
book called "The Rotten English," or "Those 
Damned English," or the "God-forsaken Coun- 
try," we don't much care. And as for criticism, 
if it be well founded and well expressed, it will 
be certain to obtain a wide popularity in Eng- 
land. Witness Mr. Collier's "England and the 
English." Personally there is nothing I enjoy 
reading more than the critical impressions of 
my own country written by an intelligent for- 
eigner. It opens the window on all sorts of shut- 
up points of view, and it calls one's attention 
to what one had never noticed because it was 
too obvious; because we ourselves are in it. 

But the Australians appear to be sensitive to 
the criticism of the foreigner, even when it is 
just and well founded. My very slender experi- 
ence has convinced me that they are often un- 
duly critical with regard to the objects of interest 
in other countries. One day, on board, one of 



38 Round the World in 

the Australians expressed disappointment and 
censure with regard to London architecture. 
I thought at first he meant the new public offices ; 
but not at all; he meant Westminster Abbey, 
which compared unfavourably with the cathedral 
in Adelaide. 

I was inclined to think this critical point of 
view which was attributed to the colonials was 
perhaps imaginary, or in any case exaggerated. 
It certainly is exaggerated; it is n't imaginary. 

Here, for instance, are some extracts taken 
from a book written by A. W. Rutherford, of 
New Zealand, on Europe. I quote them from a 
review which appeared in an Australian review, 
"The Bookfellow." Mr. Rutherford, says the 
reviewer, was disappointed with Paris; "the 
streets are not equal to those of any of our cities; 
the respectable restaurants are mean, shabby 
affairs; the swell restaurants are the haunts of 
gilded vice and supported by vice; the Seine, 
like the Thames within its city boundary, is 



Any Number of Days 39 

just a dirty ditch — neither of them to be com- 
pared with the Waikato. Most Parisians look 
dowdy. Our Maoris could teach the French a 
lesson in politeness. Meat is not safe in France. 
. . . Much of the wine is vile; no colonial could 
possibly drink it; the cheap wines of France are 
deadly rubbish." 

Of the tombs in Westminster Abbey he says 
they are dirty, untidy, inartistic; "some of them 
look like great cooking ranges." 

He is disappointed in Venice, but he gives a 
clear reason for his disappointment in the gon- 
dola. "I had imagined the latter a frivolous, 
giddy thing, gaily painted, and the gondoliers 
clothed as in the play of that name. The gon- 
doliers are just plain sailormen, in their work-a- 
day clothes." 

That explains everything. Everything, as I 
said about Naples, depends on what you expect, 
on your standard. If you expect a gondola to be 
gilded and giddy and it turns out to be black, 



4-0 Round the World in 

you are disappointed. If you expect the Seine 
and the Thames to be vast rivers, outside their 
cities and not in them, you are disappointed. 
What such authors never seem to bother about 
is whether their standard is likely to be indorsed 
by the rest of the human race or not. Their 
standard may be an excellent one for some things. 
The things which everybody else in the world 
would acknowledge to be good. For instance, 
in this case, the manners of the Maoris. The 
Maoris are the most courteous and chivalrous 
race in the world. But if they can teach manners 
to the French, there are many people in the 
colonies who would benefit by a lesson from them 
also. Another thing which the author of this 
book does not seem to realize is that there are 
many people who prefer a gondolier should look 
like a sailor, which he is, than like a singer in 
operetta. They prefer him to be dressed in his 
ordinary work-a-day clothes. They think it not 
only more appropriate to his task, but more pic- 



Any Number of Days 41 

turesque. They think a man who is dressed in 
the clothes which befit his profession will look 
more dignified than a man who is dressed up as 
for a pageant. 

The reviewer ends by saying, "Mr. Ruther- 
ford is a representative New Zealander, and in 
many ways a typical New Zealander. His inter- 
esting book is worth reading. It is compounded 
of keen observation, shrewd judgment, parish 
prejudice, and pure ignorance ... in its narrow- 
ness and in its depth, its arrogance and its en- 
lightenment, it comments upon New Zealand 
as effectively as upon Europe; it shows us why 
Dominion standards are condemned in Britain, 
sometimes justly, and it may suggest to British 
readers how the Dominions feel in regard to the 
comments of hasty British tourists with fre- 
quently less ability than Mr. Rutherford dis- 
plays." 

Yes, it does suggest that. It also suggests to 
one to hope that free trade and liberty may be 



42 Round the World in 

maintained in the matter. Let the colonial say 
exactly what he thinks about Europe, but let 
the European say exactly what he thinks about 
the colonies, and then neither side can have a 
grievance. But when the colonial complains of 
the hasty and narrow judgment of the European, 
let him have a thought for the possible beam 
in his own eye. 

Another time, on board, another Australian 
complained that the works of G. K. Chester- 
ton were bosh. "Thank God," he added, "he's 
not an Australian." 

But fancy if G. K. Chesterton had been an 
Australian. One wonders what would have been 
the effect on his figure, his style, and his philo- 
sophy. Instead of his romantic, adventurous 
optimism, would his genius have been sultry, 
pessimistic, and rebellious? 

I think he would have written gigantic epics 
on the Blue Mountains, the Bush, and gum- 
trees; wild romances about bush-rangers, and 




IF G. K. CHESTERTON HAD BEEN AN AUSTRALIAN 



Any Number of Days 43 

beach-combers, and swinging songs about Bot- 
any Bay. 

I can imagine G. K. Chesterton, looking lean 
and spare, riding a horse bareback. One of his 
qualities would have certainly developed in the 
same way, had he been born and bred over the 
sea, and that is his geniality, his large, hospit- 
able nature, his belief in goodness; for hospi- 
tality and friendliness grow if anything quicker 
on Australian and colonial soil than they do in 
England. 

Here is a fragment of verse supposed to be 
written by G. K. Chesterton, had he been born 
and bred in the country which Adam Lindsay 
Gordon sang : — 

"The Melbourne Cup," or " Hippodromania" 

The crowd came out of the Eastern lands 

To see the Melbourne Cup, 
Like Titans under tiger skies 
They were as simple as surprise 

And pleased as a bulldog pup. 



4.4 Round the World in 

Beyond the twisted gum-trees 

They suddenly ceased to swarm; 

Like statues the wild crowd stood still, 

Like soldiers little children drill, 

And silence came upon the hill 

More loud than a thunderstorm. 

And the bell rang a little, 

And the riders were up at the post, 
Full of strange fire the racers strip 
And ramp and rock and boil and skip 
Each like an angel in a ship 

That charges the tall white coast. 

The emerald course was a course indeed, 

Between that crowd of men. 
And every steed became a steed. 

"Say when, old boy, say when!" 

The flag is lowered, they're off! They come! 

Like clouds on a roaring sky. 
Jim Whiffler swirls his whip away 

And the tall grey horse goes by. 

His face is like a newspaper 

That many men take in ; 
The colours of his sleeve are mixed 

Like cocktails made with gin. 



Any Number of Days 45 

Now Strop falls back, they're neck and neck, 

Now Davis, Whiffler, ride ; 
Jim Whiffler with his brainless face 

Is spun and swirled aside. 

Jim Whiffler 's lost! but as he fails 

He screams into the din, 
The mare has still more heart to lose 

Than you have heart to win. 

And Whiffler sits high in the saddle, 

A broken-hearted jockey; 
And our Jim Whiffler, robbed of fame, 
Singed by the bookmakers with blame, 
Cries out, " I'll change my trade and name 

And take to playing hockey." 



The Indian Ocean : during the Monsoon 

It 's not at all like the Indian Ocean of which 
Kipling sings, "so soft, so something, so bloom- 
ing blue." It is grey; there's a swell, and it's 
muggy. But at night you can see the Southern 
Cross, and that's an excitement. 

How did Dante know there was such a thing 
as the Southern Cross? He certainly did know 
it, because when he emerged from hell, some- 
where near the South Pole, he says he looked at 
the polar sky and saw four stars which had never 
been seen before save by the first people — who- 
ever they were (the inhabitants of Paradise?) — 

"All' altro polo, e vidi quattro stelle 
Non viste mai fuor che alia prima gente." 

I dare say, and I believe some commentators 
do say, that his meaning was allegorical, and 
that by the four stars he meant Woman's Suff- 
rage, or the battle of Waterloo. I take leave ^to 
differ. I'm sure he meant the Southern Cross. 



Round the World 47 

Perhaps it is in Herodotus, whose geography, 
long suspected of being fantastic, is proved to 
be more and more accurate. For instance, Hero- 
dotus said the source of the Nile was in the Silver 
Mountain. This was pooh-poohed for centuries, 
until the discovery of Mount Ruwenzori proved 
that Herodotus was perfectly right. 

Dante was a great traveller, and the greatest 
pen impressionist who ever wrote. He describes 
a landscape in a line so that it stays with you 
forever. He uses the smallest possible number of 
words, hardly any adjectives, and the picture 
leaps up before you, immortal and unforgettable. 

Who can do this among the moderns? Keats 
could sometimes. Tennyson gives you English 
landscape. If you read ''In Memoriam" you 
have lived a year in the English country and 
seen the march of the English seasons. Crabbe 
can do it. Who reads Crabbe? Nobody. And 
yet he is a wonderful poet, as realistic as Tol- 
stoy and Arnold Bennett, as poignant as Gorky. 



48 Round the World in 

Byron called him the best painter of nature. 
(And Byron was a good judge.) He can give you 
a landscape in a line. For instance : — 

"And on the ocean slept th' unanchored fleet." 

He writes about the poor as they are, without 
sentimentality, and without exaggeration; and 
as a painter of English landscape he still re- 
mains the best. 

What has the poet Crabbe got to do with the 
Indian Ocean? Nothing. But it can do nobody 
any harm to be reminded of the poet Crabbe, 
although he was born in 1754 an d died in 1832. 
He may not be read by the modern generation, 
but he is not forgotten. A Frenchman wrote a 
long and excellent book about him not long ago. 
He is safe in the Temple of Fame, which once 
you have entered you cannot leave. And this 
temple is like a wheel. It goes round and round, 
and sometimes some of its inmates are in the 
glare of the sun, and sometimes they are in the 



Any Number of Days 49 

shade, but they are there; and they never fall 
out. This is comforting. It also teaches us not 
to laugh at the taste of our fathers, because that 
taste which we despise may be the rage once more 
in the days of our grandchildren. 

How we used to despise everything connected 
with the Early Victorian period. Now people 
have their rooms done up in Early Victorian 
style, and Early Victorian furniture is collected; 
rep sofas are precious, green tablecloths and 
antimacassars. They have passed the period 
of being like an out-of-date fashion plate; they 
have reached the hallowed moment of being 
picturesque and Old World. It is Late Victorian 
art that is now despised — William Morris and 
Burne- Jones. But they are safe in the temple, 
too, and a day will come when people will ad- 
mire Burne- Jones's pictures and collect Morris 
designs as a great curiosity, and say, "This is 
a very fine specimen of 1880 chintz." 

During this monsoon period I read more than 



50 Round the World 

ever. I once asked a famous politician what he 
did on a sea voyage. He said, "The first day 
I am civil to my fellow passengers, and after 
that I read Scott's novels." I adopted this plan. 



Ceylon: July 

A line of palm trees over a tumultuous fringe 
of silver foam, which leaps up on a dull opal- 
green sea, is your first impression as you get near 
the island. When you come into harbour, a quan- 
tity of narrow black boats swarm round the 
steamer. Then the tug comes alongside, and 
after waiting in it till it is no longer worth while 
to go on shore in a boat, I finally, in a burst of 
impatience, get into a boat and am rowed ashore. 
No sooner am I in the boat than the tug starts. 
However, the four black men in my boat pull 
hard and we reach the pier almost at the same 
time as the tug. 

The first thing to do is to take a rickshaw. 
It is fine, but fortunately cloudy; the sun is 
hidden. In spite of this, it is hot, very hot. The 
streets are made of red sand, the houses of Vene- 
tian red stone. You pass palm trees, and trees 
which look like acacias, only they have mingled 



$2 Round the World in 

with the intense green of their foliage a quan- 
tity of scarlet flowers. I go scudding along the 
street to the Galleface Hotel. You pass babus 
in white European clothes, and frail black Cin- 
galese dressed in diaphanous silks, and Anglo- 
Indians in pith helmets. The world of Kipling 
is revealed to one in a trice. A long drive along 
the sea leads to the hotel. This is the fashionable 
esplanade of Ceylon. Carriages pass up and down 
full of wealthy natives. The sea throws up a 
huge long wash of booming surf. The hotel is 
a large white building, like the section of an 
exhibition. The bedrooms are high wooden 
cubicles. As soon as you arrive a tailor springs 
from somewhere and asks you if you want any 
clothes — thin clothes — made in the night. 
I don't think I do. As soon as I have got a room 
and disposed of my luggage, I take a rickshaw 
and drive through the native part of the town. 
It becomes more and more like Kipling. You 
pass little bullocks, and natives bathing and 



Any Number of Days 53 

washing clothes in a pool; shops full of fruit; 
natives squatting, natives talking, natives smok- 
ing. You hear all manner of cries, and you smell 
the smell of the East. 

I wander about until it is dark and then come 
back to dinner. The tailor appears again. I 
don't want any clothes: but it is no use, one has 
to order them, so importunate is he. He measures 
me and promises to have the complete suit ready 
by the next morning at 6.30. 

It is when you are dressed for dinner and you 
come down into the large high dining-room, full 
of electric fans, that you realize that it is impos- 
sible to be cool. It is an absorbing, annihilating 
damp heat that saps your very being. 

The first thing to do is to eat a mango. Will 
it be as good as you are told it is? Yes, it is 
better. At first you think it is just an ordinary 
apricot, and then you think it is a banana; no, 
fresher; a peach, a strawberry, and then a deli- 
cious, sharp, fresh, aromatic after-taste comes; 



54 Round the World in 

slightly tinged with turpentine, but not bitter. 
Then you get all the tastes at once, and you know 
that the mango is like nothing else but its own 
incomparable self. 

It has all these different tastes at once, simul- 
taneously. In this it resembles the beatific 
vision as told of by St. Thomas Aquinas. The 
point of the beatific vision, says St. Thomas, is 
its infinite variety. So that those who enjoy it 
have at the same time the feeling that they are 
looking at a perfect landscape, hearing the sweet- 
est music, bathing in a cold stream on a hot day, 
reaching the top of a mountain, galloping on 
grass on a horse that is n't running away, float- 
ing over tree-tops in a balloon, reading very 
good verse, eating toasted cheese, drinking a 
really good cocktail — and any other nice thing 
you can think of, all at once. The point, there- 
fore, of the taste of the mango is its infinite 
variety. It was probably mangoes which grew 
in Eden on the Tree of Knowledge, only I expect 



Any Number of Days . 55 

they had a different kind of skin then, and were 
without that cumbersome and obstinate kernel, 
which makes them so very difficult to eat. 

There are a good many people at dinner — 
Englishmen and Englishwomen. Their faces 
are washed absolutely chalk-white by the heat, 
as if every drop of blood had been drained from 
them. That is what comes from living in such a 
climate. One thinks of Kipling once more. The 
room seems to be full of his characters. There 
is Mrs. Hawksbee; I recognised her at once. 
There is Otis Yeere and Pluffles, and Churton 
and Reggie Burke, and Pack, and I believe that 
conjuror in the verandah is Strickland in dis- 
guise. He comes nearer and does the mango 
trick, and then begins to charm a snake; but we 
all refuse to see the snake charmed, charm he 
never so wisely, having a horror of snakes. 

It gets hotter and hotter; one feels one's bones 
melting. 

The next morning punctually at 6.30 the 



56 Round the World 

tailor arrives with the suit of clothes finished, 
as he promised, and by eight we have to be on 
board the steamer. 

To-day the sun is shining with all his might, 
and one realizes that if one had stayed a few 
hours longer in this beautiful island, it would 
have entailed either buying a pith helmet or 
getting a sunstroke. 

The harbour is a lovely sight in the early morn- 
ing. Church parties from a British man-of-war 
are on their way to church. The sea is like an 
emerald to-day. The little narrow native boats, 
full of gorgeous-coloured fruits, are slipping about 
round the liner. I am sorry to leave Ceylon. 



From Colombo to Fremantle : July 

The Indian Ocean once more. The weather 
now is pleasant, but it is still very hot. We are 
in the doldrums. The word " doldrums" con- 
jures up visions of adventure, of pirates, of 
Spanish galleons, of frigates fighting privateers, 
and of Marryat's characters. 

I don't believe a man who is not a sailor can 
write a really good book about the sea. The 
knowledge involved is so intimate, and requires 
years of soaking in. There are, of course, excep- 
tions. Shakespeare has led some people to be- 
lieve that, besides being a lawyer, a Lord Chan- 
cellor, and a woman, he was also a sailor. Rud- 
yard Kipling, I should say, could deceive the 
elect, and surely "Captains Courageous" is one 
of the very best sea-stories ever written. "Treas- 
ure Island" is an adventure book, and a master- 
piece, but then it really deals very little with the 
sea. Turn to Marryat: what a difference there 



58 Round the World in 

is between him and the amateur sea- writer ! You 
feel that the sea is his whole life; he lays bare 
the very pulse of the machine of sea-life. I wish 
some of the great novelists had spent their early 
years on a training-ship. I wonder what would 
have been the result had this been the fate of 
George Meredith, for instance. I think it would 
have made his style more lucid ; but perhaps not. 
Can you imagine a ship of whom the skipper was 
George Meredith, the first mate Henry James, 
the second mate Thomas Hardy, the purser 
Bernard Shaw, the ship's cook G. K. Chesterton, 
and the steward Max Beerbohm? I can imagine 
the following conversation taking place : — 

Scene : Deck of a Ship in the Indian Ocean 

Captain Meredith {to First Mate James): I 
think we had better fiddle harmonics on the strings 
of the mainsail. 

First Mate James: I mentioned to you, sir, the 
last time that we somewhat infelicitously met, that 



Any Number of Days 59 

I intended to appeal, with a dozen differential pre- 
cautions, to another and probably more closely 
qualified meteorologic authority on the subject of 
the Second Mate's whimsical, wanton, perhaps for- 
tunate but so far unconfirmed and unqualified 
change of course, and indeed, if I may venture with- 
out presumption, and at the risk of incurring the 
suspicion of undue parenthesis, and of an almost 
tremulous desire to say everything, I would, and 
indeed I had done so already, but for a fugitive 
shade of displeasure on your eyebrows, I would 
adumbrate the shadow of a surmise, that, faced 
as we are — 

Captain Meredith (impatiently): The young 
who fear to enter the forest of advice do so at the 
cost of losing their way in the lane that knows no 
ending. 

(Enter Ship's Cook Chesterton) 

Cook Chesterton: The Purser complains of the 
pea-soup. He says it is not fit for a dog. It is true. 
It is not fit for a dog, but the whole soul and glory 
of this fast and frantic life is to eat and to enjoy 
food that a dog rejects. He does n't see that it is 
the dog who is wrong. 



60 Round the World in 

Purser Shaw: I never said that the dog was 
wrong in his choice of food. I have no objection 
to eating dog biscuit; what I do object to is eating 
dog soup. . . . What I do object to is eating a soup 
which professes to be made of vegetables and in 
reality is made of dog. I see no moral objection 
to cannibalism. I have no moral objection to eat- 
ing shoulder of boatswain; but I do object to the 
old-fashioned superstition of believing that soup 
is still made of fresh peas when it is n't. That soup 
was made of old flesh. If you don't believe me, ask 
the steward. Here, Steward. 

(Enter Steward Beerbohm) 

Captain Meredith: Our battle is ever between 
undeserved rewards and stolen fruits. What say 
you, Steward? 

Steward Beerbohm: Let us forget these bick- 
erings and turn ourselves lightly to the thought of 
home, of Piccadilly, of the artificial haunts and the 
gaudy hostels, where indifferent cooks and careless 
waiters proffer inartistically prepared mets to the 
blase, the faded and the jaded and the new rich, 
who partake of it with feigned satisfaction, and pay 
for it with a faint but exquisite pleasure in knowing 
that the bill is more than they can afford. 



Any Number of Days 61 

Purser Shaw: Your Piccadilly is here and now. 
I venture to submit that the Steward is an in- 
curable romantic. Now romance in food is pre- 
posterous. 

Cook Chesterton: There is nothing so romantic 
as food, nothing so poetic as roast beef, nothing so 
fantastic as plum-pudding, nothing so lyrical as 
eggs and bacon, nothing in cant modern sense so 
artistic as a mutton chop, nothing so dreamy as 
toasted cheese. 

Purser Shaw: Exactly. You are still infected 
with the poison of your nurseries and the sentiment 
of Christmas. I have exploded Christmas. I have 
annihilated the nursery. 

Steward Beerbohm: I think Christmas very 
quaint and charming, and a nursery, conducted 
according to the principles of the early years of 
Victoria the First, a place of dainty manners and 
delicate precepts and wistful rhymes. I would not 
forget them for anything. 

First Mate James: The word nursery, now you 
speak it, throws a curious thrill through the lining, 
so to speak, of the psychological situation. We 



62 Round the World in 

might, in fact, in such a case even follow the stew- 
ard into another and no less refined a speculation, 
the question of whether the nursery, the sanest 
seat of moral ethics, might not, after all, be the 
high final if somewhat narrow circle of all ultimate 
— that is to say — 

Captain Meredith: To have the sense of the 
eternal in the nursery is nothing. To have had it 
is the beginning of wisdom. But let us rather put 
off discussion of the theme, until round the mahog- 
any we can broach a bottle of the Old Widow, nay 
rather, Hermitage — ah ! that was a great wine — 

Steward Beerbohm: The suggestion of asceti- 
cism in the name, blent with the sensuality of the 
thing, heightens its charm. Who would not be a 
hermit, and dwell in one of those rococo palacules 
built for weary monarchs in an age of scepticism, 
flute-playing, and minuets? 

{Enter Second Mate Hardy) 

Second Mate Hardy: The spirit of the years is 
looking down upon our ship with an ironical smile. 
O Wessex, Wessex! Would that I could see Stone- 
henge and a large red moon rising over the plain. 




THERE IS NOTHING SO ROMANTIC AS FOOD 



Any Number of Days 63 

Captain Meredith: I am glad to be away from 
the island of chills and the informes hiemes. 

Purser Shaw: Sir, with all due respect, I cannot 
allow this digression to continue. No Englishman 
can talk consecutively for more than two minutes 
on the same subject. 

Cook Chesterton: That is why the Irish have 
conquered England. 

Captain Meredith: Observe the Southern Cross, 
if indeed that be the Southern Cross, hanging like 
a jeweled hilt in the spheral blue — 

Steward Beerbohm: Pretty little trinket! Is 
it a brooch or an aigrette? Methinks a device of 
Cartier — 

Captain Meredith: Those stars are pebbles on 
the silvery wheel-course of the chariot of the moon. 

Second Mate Hardy: Pitiless, inflexible stars, 
thousands and thousands of millions of miles away. 

Purser Shaw: Don't you believe it. That 's one 
of the lies men of science tell us. 



64 Round the World in 

Cook Chesterton: It does n't matter if the stars 
are twenty miles off, or twenty millions of miles off. 
The point about the stars is that they are stars. 

{Enter an Ordinary Seaman) 
Ordinary Seaman: Please, sir, the ship is sinking. 

Second Mate Hardy: I knew it! O Irony! 

Purser Shaw: Then we shall have to eat roast 
boatswain after all. 

First Mate James: If I might hazard a sugges- 
tion, without of course trying to grasp any imper- 
tinent or rather importunate shadow of a scheme — 

Ordinary Seaman: The cabin boy has escaped 
in the galley. 

Captain Meredith: O brave! 

Steward Beerbohm: Ouf ! 

{The ship sinks with all hands.) 

To-night (when is it? I have lost count of time, 



Any Number of Days 65 

but I know it is still July) one of the officers 
told me a yarn. It was his own ghost story, and 
it was ultimately spoiled for him, just as hap- 
pened in the case of Kipling, when he heard 
phantom billiard players playing all night and 
found out the next day that the noise was caused 
by a rat and a loose window- sash. This is the 
story; but I shall spoil it in the telling because 
to tell a sea-yarn you must be a sailor. 

The ship was sailing somewhere near the Cape 
of Good Hope. It was dirty weather and the 
sailor who was on watch came and reported to 
the officer that there was a ghost in the sea, 
for'ard. 

The officer sent him away, but he returned 
almost immediately and reported that the ghost 
was still there. 

The officer said rude things, and added that 
he had better go aloft and watch the ghost from 
there. Another man was sent to replace the 
craven, and all was calm for a while, when sud- 



66 Round the World in 

denly this second sailor came back, pale with 
fear, and said that a woman was rising through 
the mist from the sea. Some one else was sent 
to replace this man, and the ghost had such an 
effect upon him that he fell down and broke his 
leg. Then the captain came on deck and the 
officer reported the state of affairs to him. He 
went forward and came back saying, "It is a 
ghost." Then, being a religious man, he fetched 
a Bible and tried to exorcise the ghost by reading 
the Scripture. 

While this was going on, the officer who told 
me the story went forward, and there, as plain 
as a pikestaff, in the murky mist, he saw a white 
woman slowly rise in the swell and then disap- 
pear. Paralysed with horror, he stood looking 
at the sea, and the woman rose once more; and 
then, his fear left him, and he realized that it 
was the figurehead of the ship which had got 
knocked off. 

But I have spoiled that story. I have merely 



Any Number of Days 67 

told the bare facts; what you want is the whole 
thing; the dialogue, the details; the technical 
terms. 

From Colombo to Fremantle is probably the 
most monotonous part of the voyage. The only 
object of interest is the albatross, but as nobody 
shot one, with a crossbow, no untoward events 
happened. 



Fremantle ; July 

Fremantle is the least attractive of ports. 
You are not meant to stay there. You are meant 
to go on to Perth. Nevertheless, it was my first 
sight of an Australian city. It struck me as 
being in some ways rather like a Russian pro- 
vincial town; this is not odd, because Russia 
is a country of colonists. What differentiates 
a Russian city from an Australian — and indeed 
from any other city — is the churches with 
their gilded spires and blue cupolas and their 
Byzantine shape. 

At Fremantle the firemen went on shore — 
against orders. They drank to their hearts' 
content, and came back in a state of truculent 
inebriation, as did many of the steerage passen- 
gers. We left Fremantle in the evening. There 
was a strong wind blowing. Two little tugs were 
doing their best to pull us out of the narrow har- 
bour. They could scarcely pull their own weight ; 



Round the World 69 

and then one of the hawsers broke. We drifted 
to port where alongside of the wharf some cargo 
steamers lay at anchor. 

''Hullo!" said somebody; "we shall only just 
do it." 

The passengers became interested. 

Then it became evident that we were n't going 
just to do it; and we went — crunch! crunch! — 
into the steamers alongside the wharf, carrying 
away the wooden gear they had to put cattle in. 

Then began a slow battle of the tugs against 
the wind; whenever we seemed to be moving 
to starboard, the wind brought us back again to 
the wharf. It looked at one moment as if we 
were going to be there all night. Two of the fire- 
men were fighting forward. Then the wind 
dropped a little, our own engines began to work, 
and we steamed safely out of the harbour. 

We did hardly any damage to the ship against 
which we crunched, except carrying away that 
wooden gear; but the moment any little incident 



7<d Round the World 

of that kind happens in a ship, it makes you 
realize instantly how disagreeable a real accident 
would be. These large ships look so helpless 
under such circumstances: and after all, when 
accidents happen, they happen, whether a ship 
is in harbour or in midocean, whether she is large 
or small: witness the Royal George and the 
Titanic. 



Adelaide : July 

We reached Adelaide on a Saturday night, 
and on Sunday morning I went on shore and 
saw for the first time the dark-brown colouring, 
the scrub, and the gum-trees of Australia. It 
was supposed to be winter; but it was what we 
call in England early spring, because the almond 
trees were in full bloom. The atmosphere was 
dazzingly clear but cold. The whole colour and 
nature of the place, with its dark evergreens, 
brown earth, luxuriant winter vegetation, and its 
blue and lilac hills in the distance, and its limpid 
sky, reminded me of the south of France in win- 
ter; but Australia has a peculiar atmosphere of 
its own which, if properly painted, ought to make 
the fortune of a painter. There are some very 
clever Australian painters. 

Adelaide is called the "Garden City" of Aus- 
tralia. It deserves the name, for it looks like a 
garden even in winter. The hotels are good, the 



72 Round the World in 

streets spacious and wide boulevards, and there 
is the most beautifully situated steeplechase 
course I have ever seen. It being Sunday, every- 
thing was shut: this made occupation in the city 
less interesting than it might have been, and it 
was too cold to motor into the hills. 

At Adelaide fourteen firemen left the ship for- 
ever. The trouble about firemen on the mail 
steamers that go to Australia is that they are 
white men. They cannot stand the heat of the 
tropics and they do not earn a living wage. 

"Who," as the chief engineer said to me, 
"would not be a fireman in the Red Sea in July, 
when the temperature is 120 in the shade? And 
who would not be a man who has to look after 
firemen?" 

One cannot travel on a big liner without being 
amazed, or rather aghast, at the conditions under 
which the crew and the stewards live in the mer- 
chant service, and the terms under which the 
officers serve, so that one wonders how it happens 



Any Number of Days 73 

that any one goes to sea; and one is inclined al- 
most to agree with Dr. Johnson's opinions on the 
subject. 

"A ship," he said, "is worse than a gaol. There 
is in a gaol better air, better company, better 
conveniences of every kind; and a ship has 
the additional disadvantage of being in danger. 
When men come to like a sea-life they are not 
fit to live on land." 

"Then," said Boswell, "it would be cruel in a 
father to breed his son to the sea." 

"It would be cruel," said Johnson, "in a 
father who thinks as I do. Men go to sea before 
they know the unhappiness of that way of life; 
and when they come to know it, they cannot 
escape from it, because it is then too late to 
choose another profession; as, indeed, is generally 
the case with men when they have once engaged 
in any particular way of life." 

But what is wrong with the officer's life in 
the merchant service? it will be asked. 



74 Round the World in 

The answer is that he is miserably underpaid. 
In some cases he gets less than an able seaman 
gets in Australia. He has to buy linen, his uni- 
form, many pairs of whites. His work is one 
of great responsibility. A captain when he has 
worked for twenty years gets no pension. Talk 
with any officer in the merchant service and his 
advice to any one who thinks of going to sea is, 
"Don't." 

As to the men, a sailor's life in a liner is about 
the same as a sailor's life anywhere, but the 
accommodation of the stewards is miserable. 
The "glory-hole" where they sleep crowded to- 
gether has an almost incredible insufficiency of 
space and air. And a first-class steward has to 
keep himself neat and clean: besides which he 
is extremely hard- worked. 

Talking of the recent dock strike in London 
with one of the stewards, he told me they did n't 
want to come out in sympathy with the strikers, 
because they got absolutely nothing by it. They 



Any Number of Days 75 

were most of them made to come out on strike, 
with no prospect of any betterment in matters 
which concerned them. 

I don't believe the stewards' accommodation 
in a ship is a bit better than it was forty 
years ago. 



Melbourne : July 

I practically only had a glimpse of Mel- 
bourne; a drive through the city, a visit to a 
newspaper office and to some of the shops, a 
walk through the park in the twilight, a dinner 
with a friend, and a drive in a taxi back to the 
harbour. 

I was struck by the mildness of the climate; 
but I was told that up till then the weather had 
been very cold. I was struck here again by the 
softness and peculiar luminous quality of the 
atmosphere ; by the size of the city, which seemed 
quite enormous; a handsome city, with regular 
streets, tall buildings, and a multitude of cars. 



Sydney : August 2 

We entered the bay in the dawn — or rather 
before the dawn; it was very misty; we moved 
in a vague twilight of blue shadows. I got up 
to see the bay, but you could see nothing dis- 
tinctly, nothing but mist and blue shadows; the 
whole thing very unearthly] and beautiful. I 
went back to my bunk, intending to get up 
again in half an hour's time, when it was lighter. 
But I went to sleep, and when I woke up again 
we were right against the wharf. 

You could hear the bugles from a British 
man-of-war, the Drake. It was a brilliant, warm, 
delicious 'day. 

I spent a whole day in the city of Sydney, 
exploring the stores, riding about aimlessly in 
the cars. I had luncheon at the Australian Hotel. 
The waiters were dressed as stewards, and, in- 
deed, many of them are ex-stewards. I thought the 
food excellent. I visited two excellent bookstores. 



jS Round the World in 

When you go to a bookstore in London and 
ask for any book, you are told they have n't 
got it. Here in Sydney I found the men in the 
stores abnormally intelligent. You could even 
get different kinds of books written by the same 
author, which is a difficult feat anywhere. Most 
booksellers think that if a man writes a book on, 
say, poultry, it is preposterous to ask for a work 
of his on political economy or step-dancing. And 
yet it happens that many writers write books on 
different subjects — Andrew Lang, for instance. 
We received the sad news of the death of An- 
drew Lang at Fremantle. Andrew Lang is an 
author who spent the large capital of his wit, his 
learning, his wide sympathies, royally and gen- 
erously without stint; he was a master of Eng- 
lish prose, and some of the best pieces of prose 
he ever wrote were flung into leaders in the 
"Daily News." Those which were afterwards 
collected in a book called "Lost Leaders" make 
the most delightful reading. He wrote just as 




IN SYDNEY I FOUND THE MEN IN THE BOOKSTORES ABNORMALLY 
INTELLIGENT 



Any Number of Days 79 

well and just as wittily on street noises or mid- 
summer heat as on Homer, the Young Pretender, 
or Joan of Arc. He was profoundly unprovincial ; 
he had a fine and rare quiet appreciation of 
French poetry; he could write ghost stories, 
fairy tales, doggerel; he was a supreme dialec- 
tician, an amusing parodist, a prince of letter- 
writers, as well as a poet ; — perhaps he was above 
all things a poet. The following translation of 
Rufinus' verses to Rhodocleia, sending her a 
wreath, is a good example of his verse. He has 
turned an exquisite Greek poem into an exquis- 
ite English poem. 

"Ah, Golden Eyes, to win you yet, 
I bring mine April coronet. 
The lovely blossoms of the spring 
For you I weave, to you I bring 
These roses with the lilies set, 
The dewy dark-eyed violet, 
Narcissus, and the wind-flower wet: 
Wilt thou disdain mine offering? 
Ah, Golden Eyes! 



80 Round the World in 

Crowned with thy lover's flowers, forget 
The pride wherein thy heart is set, 
For thou, like these or anything, 
Hast but a moment of thy spring, 
Thy spring, and then — the long regret! 
Ah, Golden Eyes!" 

To go back to Sydney and the stores. The 
trouble is I cannot remember either of their 
names. I had dinner at a restaurant called the 
Palace Hotel, and after dinner I visited the 
office of the Sydney "Herald," where I spent a 
very pleasant time. I had already been met by 
two interviewers in the morning, and they asked 
me whether I was going to write anything about 
Australia. I said No, that I had no intention of 
so doing, as I did not believe in writing seriously 
about a country where one does n't make a proper 
stay. Practically I saw nothing of Australia; 
but I suppose there is no harm in writing these 
notes — the mere rough impressions of a fugi- 
tive traveller. 

Although I was only twelve hours in Sydney, 



Any Number of Days 81 

I had occasion to notice the hospitality of the 
people. What struck me also was the life and 
gaiety of the place. 

The next morning, which was Saturday, I had 
to leave the liner, which had been my home for 
the last six weeks, and embark on the Maun- 
ganui for Wellington, whither I was bound. 

The Maunganui, which belongs to the Union 
Steamship Company, is a new vessel, and quite 
extraordinarily comfortable. The voyage from 
Sydney to Wellington takes from Saturday to 
Wednesday, but sometimes if the weather is bad 
it takes longer. 

As we steamed out of Sydney, I at last had a 
view of the famous bay, and it exceeded all my 
expectations : the colouring is so rich, the lines and 
shape of the coast are so nobly planned, and the 
sky and the sea are so intoxicatingly bright, 
fresh, and dazzling. I am sorry for people who 
are disappointed in Sydney. 



On Board the Maunganui: August 

The ship is crowded with passengers. There 
is a very comfortable smoking-room on the upper 
deck. The ship is beautifully clean and new- 
looking. She is a new ship. She made her first 
voyage in February, 191 2. 

There are on board fifty "boys" who are going 
to Buenos Ayres. There are engineers. As for 
the rest of the passengers, there are many men, 
many women, and many children. The sea is 
unusually smooth — unusually, that is to say, 
for this part of the ocean, which I am told is 
generally rough. 

I settle myself down to read O'Brien's "Life 
of Parnell," one of the best biographies in the 
English language. 

I think a ship is the pleasantest place to read 
in in the world. First, you have the advan- 
tages of being indoors and out of doors at the 
same time, if you sit on a deck chair, or in a 



Round the World 83 

smoking-room near an open door. Secondly, 
you are just sufficiently and not too much inter- 
rupted. You can pause and watch the passengers. 
You overhear scraps of talk. You engage your- 
self in desultory conversation. 

But during all this first afternoon I am riveted 
by the doings of Parnell — the man who, so 
cold and aloof, exercised an electric power over 
the rest of his fellow creatures: the man who 
smashed the machinery of the House of Com- 
mons, in order to compel the British to deal 
with the Irish question. 

I was at school when some of the most stir- 
ring acts of that drama were being played. All 
schoolboys are, of course, "Conservatives," and 
our schoolmaster was a fanatical Tory. The 
mere mention of Mr. Gladstone's name mad- 
dened him, and I remember one day his telling 
the boys that he had received a circular from 
some political Liberal association, and that he 
intended to send it back to the secretary with 



84 Round the World in 

a penny inside it, so that the sender should have 
to pay eightpence. This was a good civic lesson 
for the young! All the boys professed to be 
staunch Tories; but if it was discovered that 
one's parents were Liberals, one was labelled 
Liberal. This was my unfortunate predicament. 

The general election of 1885 took place when 
I was at school. The Head Master addressed the 
school when it began, and he prefaced his speech 
by saying, "There are only seven Liberals in 
the school." This was nice for the Liberals. 

On the 5th of November an effigy of Cham- 
berlain was burned in the garden. The effigy 
bore a large cardboard cow with the words 
"Three Acres" written on it. Years afterwards 
I described this incident in an article for a Lon- 
don daily. In mentioning Chamberlain I added 
the words, "who was at that time a radical." 
The editor crossed out these words. The Con- 
servative readers of this daily were not to be 
reminded that Chamberlain had ever been a 



Any Number of Days 85 

radical. It seemed almost like blasphemy to 
hint at such a thing. And yet it was true. Un- 
less history be suppressed altogether, the fact 
will have to go down to posterity that in 1885 
Chamberlain was a radical. It seemed a terrible 
shame in those days that one's parents should 
be on what, in the opinion of one's world, was 
obviously the wrong side. 

English private schools are, or were, the most 
curious institutions in the world. The parents 
of to-day say they are entirely changed and 
altered. They may be; but one thing is quite 
certain, the parents don't know. The only peo- 
ple who know are the boys, and they don't reveal 
the secrets of the fortress until they are grown 
up; but, judging by what grown-up boys of 
twenty now tell one, they do not seem to me to 
be greatly changed. 

My school was totally unlike the schools de- 
picted in fiction and pictured by the boyish 
imagination. There were no bullies — at least, 



86 Round the World in 

not among the boys; the masters did the bully- 
ing. They exercised a reign of terror; they ruled 
by mysterious hints and vague threats, so that 
one moved perpetually under the shadow of an 
impending but unknown doom. The sense of 
guilt for some crime which one did n't know the 
nature of was perpetually being brought home 
to one. And the boys used to catch the tone of 
mystery, and act as if they formed part of the 
conspiracy, which, of course, they did n't. They 
were all equally in the dark. 

The discretion of boys is extraordinary: their 
fear of giving anything away; their constant 
profession of happiness, in spite of obvious mis- 
ery. But then, of course, it must be remembered 
that they accept the conditions of school life as 
the best that life has to offer. They think that 
is happiness. 

In the evening after dinner some of the " boys" 
played poker. Gradually I made their acquaint- 



Any Number of Days 87 

ance. One of them told me of the life in Buenos 
Ayres. He asked me to lend him a book. He had 
a pal who read books, and was in fact reading, 
he said, a book which he believed to be the best 
book in print. That was a nice phrase, and I 
have already quoted it. He fetched the book: 
it turned out to be "Monte Cristo." I agree as 
to the description of it. 

In another book on English prisons I have 
read just lately, called "A Holiday in Gaol," 
the writer says that "Monte Cristo" was en- 
gaged half a dozen deep by the prisoners at 
Wormwood Scrubbs. 

The "boy" turned over the leaves of "Monte 
Cristo"* and came across the name "Sinbad the 
Sailor," and asked me whether it was the same 
story as "Sinbad the Sailor," because he had 
seen that played at Sydney, and could n't make 
it out. It is, indeed, not very easy to make out 
the story of "Sinbad the Sailor" from a panto- 
mime version. 



88 Round the World in 

I saw this actual version of " Sinbad the Sailor" 
later in Wellington, and a very good pantomime 
it was; but lucidity and cohesion of plot were 
not its strongest points. 

In Sydney pantomimes go on all the year 
round, I am told, and not only at Christmas time, 
as in England. 

I was playing patience after dinner. This led 
to talking of fortune-telling by cards, and one 
of the Sydney "boys" asked me to tell his 
fortune, which I did, as well as that of five or 
six others. The next day one of them informed 
me that I had told their fortunes "to a tick." 

Let me hastily say that I don't believe there 
is anything in it; but cards are uncanny things 
all the same, and fruitful in odd coincidences. 

Once when I was travelling in Russia I met a 
man who professed to tell fortunes by cards. 
It was in a third-class railway carriage and the 
man was a poor man. This is how he did it. He 
told one to wish, and then dealt out his cards in 



Any Number of Days 89 

the orthodox manner; but he added, "When 
you wish, you must n't think of a green horse or 
else your wish won't come true. ' ' As if after being 
told such a thing one could help thinking of a 
green horse. 

I am reading a book by that delightful author, 
William de Morgan, called "Somehow Good." 
He is one of those authors who does the work for 
you. The book reads itself: just in the same way 
as Italian servants say that crockery breaks. 
For instance, an Italian servant never says, "The 
cook has broken a plate," but "A plate has 
broken itself to the cook." (Si e rotto un piatto 
alia cuoca.) 

I have often wondered how housemaids ac- 
quired the apparently innate genius they pos- 
sess for breaking things. It certainly amounts 
to genius; for it happens automatically and sud- 
denly, as if prompted by divine and authentic 
inspiration. The gift is apparently shared by 



90 Round the World in 

steerage passengers in a liner. The chief officer 
of the liner in which I travelled from England told 
me, before we had reached Fremantle, that 
twelve hundred glasses had been broken in the 
steerage. (There were eight hundred passengers.) 

Sailors and Chinamen never break anything; 
but, on the other hand, there is nothing that 
children will not break. Children are like white 
ants; they are entirely destructive, and they con- 
struct nothing, except sand castles. And sand 
is the best safety-valve for the terrible and un- 
limited powers of childhood that exists. 

This has been noted by the poet, who says: — 

"On the other hand, 
Children in ordinary dress 
May always play with sand." 

In reading through the last pages that I have 
written, I am struck by the fact that there is 
very little about travel in these supposed notes 
on travel. The word longitude has not yet 




YOU mustn't think of a green horse 



Any Number of Days 91 

occurred, and no scrap of information that could 
be of any possible practical use to any one has 
yet been given. Does it matter? 

Practical information can be sought for in 
guidebooks. I say sought for purposely, for it 
can really only be obtained by experience. As 
for geographical details, I cannot think that the 
perusal of them is very interesting. And then, 
in writing on random subjects under a mislead- 
ing title, I am only following well-known prece- 
dents. For instance, if you buy a modern book 
on "Gardening," what do you find? You open 
the book, say, at the chapter headed "June," 
and you find this kind of thing : — 

I don't think the pictures in the Royal Academy 
are so good this year as they were last : but the aver- 
age level is on the whole higher. I remember Lord 
Melbourne saying that the Academy was the only 
picture gallery he really enjoyed, because the pic- 
tures told one stories and there was no damned non- 
sense of art about them. I am sorry that the girls 
of the present day are no longer taught sketching. 
Every girl should be able to sketch badly. Albums 



92 Round the World in 

of sketches, made on the Continent, are a great 
resource on rainy Saturdays, and do well to sell at 
bazaars. 

Italy is a good subject for sketching. Apropos of 
Italy, I came across the following poem in the South 
Wiltshire "Gazette." It was said to be by Words- 
worth, but a kind correspondent tells me that it 
is really by Miss Ellen F. Winthrope, who died 
at Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1887, at the age of 
seventy- three: — 

Lines written at Florence 

Look upward, for the sky is not all cloud. 
Look forward, think not of the dismal shroud. 
No lane but has a turning, and no road 
That leads not somewhere to a warm abode. 
Take courage. If the day seems rather long, 
The cooling dew will fall at evensong. 

Believe, and Doubt is sure to slink away, 
Doubt is a cur ; and Fear is but a fool ; 
Rely upon yourself and let your stay 
Be the observance of the heavenly rule. 
Never say die ; and do not be afraid ; 
At eventide the wages will be paid. 

A Dutch friend of mine gave me the following 
very good recipe for cooking anchovies: "Take an 



Any Number of Days 93 

old garden hat, boil for seven minutes in boiling 
water. Add four pounds of cinnamon, one nutmeg, 
and half a glass of Chablis. Cut the anchovies in 
pieces and place on china plate. Pour the boiling 
water over them, and serve tepid with slices of 
lemon." 

Another friend of mine gave me this quaint, old- 
fashioned recipe for boiling a turkey: "Gather straw- 
berry leaves on Lamas Eve, press them in the dis- 
tillery until the aromatick perfume thereof becomes 
sensible. Take a fat turkey and pluck him, and 
baste him, then enfold him carefully in the straw- 
berry leaves. Then boyl him in water from the 
well, and add rosemary, rue, parsefoil, passevelours, 
carraway, floramour, velvet flower, lavender, this- 
tles, stinging nettles, and other sweet smelling 
herbs. Add also a pinte of Canary wine, and half 
pound of butter and one of ginger passed through 
the sieve. Serve with plums and stewed raisons 
and a little salt. Cover him with a silver dish cover. 
The Compleat Cook, 1656." 

Appended to this was the quaint motto: — 

"Live and learne, for flowyrres fade, 
June waiteth not for man or mayde." 

That is the kind of thing you will find in the 



94 Round the World in 

June chapter of the modern book on "Garden- 
ing." 

Then, if you take a book on a definite place, 
called, say, Rome. What do you find? Facts? 
No. Dates? No. But something like this: — 

The Spirit of Rome {with apologies to Vernon Lee) 

May ii. We drove this afternoon to the Villa 
Madama; on the way we talked of Richard Strauss 
and the non-melodic musicians. Strauss is a Diony- 
siac. We compared his prophetic mood-music with 
the old-fashioned facile melodies of Wagner that 
pleased our youth. While we were talking a shep- 
herd passed us. As he passed he took off his hat and 
said, "Buon giorno." Very Roman that. 

May 27. Porta Pia. A ragged cloud in the west 
and the sun shining very pale and watery. Passed 

a man playing a harmonium. P insisted on 

stopping to listen and the man asked him the time. 

This is the kind of thing that only happens to P 

and in Rome. 

May 31. Mount Aventine. S and I strolled 

up the hill. We walked into a church (blonde mar- 
bles and seaweed-coloured pillars) . A woman dressed 
in a bonnet and black silk came in and said her 



Any Number of Days 95 

prayers. S said this reminded her of Boston. 

Why? 

June 2. Sunday. Heard a sermon in the after- 
noon at the church of St. Praxed. (Alas! the tomb 
of Browning's Bishop is not there, nay, probably 
Browning had another church in his eye.) The 
priest in the middle of his sermon, yawned, and 
said, "Basta!" Then, for the first time during this 
visit, for the first time since twenty years, I felt 
the unmistakable thrill of recognition, and said, 
"This is Rome." 

Or there is another method. That is the con- 
templative historic description of something you 
have never seen (the Belloc method). You don't 
pretend to have seen it; but you describe what 
you might have felt, had you seen it. It is some- 
thing like this : — 

I have never been to Aries. But yesterday as I 
was walking along the Roman Road between Chanc- 
tonbury and Horsham, I thought of Aries. Aries 
is perpetually seeking new things in Europe. Aries 
has the spirit, the judgment, and the greatness of 
the thirteenth century. Chicago differs utterly in 
mood from Aries. In Chicago there is war. You 



96 Round the World in 

buy a newspaper and ten to one the leading article 
will be an affirmation or a denial of a creed or a 
dogma. In Aries you may buy newspapers for a 
month and get nothing but the record of the weath- 
er, two days old. And, as I consider the two towns, 
neither of which I have visited, I find almost as 
great a pleasure in imagining them as in remem- 
bering the sharp pictures of Birmingham and Swin- 
don. I have been to Swindon ; and that reminds me, 
Swindon has a song of its own. It is called " If the 
Swin was in the Swim." I have great hopes of the 
town of Swindon. 

The world has become introspective and sub- 
jective. People no longer write about what they 
heard or saw. They assume that the reader knows 
all that. But they describe what they felt and 
thought on Monday, or on Tuesday, or on any 
other day of the week. Anatole France started 
the game by saying that criticism was the ad- 
ventures of the soul among masterpieces. 

This method came as a boon to reviewers and 
critics: they no longer had to pretend to read 
the books they reviewed. To dramatic critics, 



Any Number of Days 97 

especially, the system was invaluable; but they 
have now carried it further still. The "literary" 
critic who wrote an account of a play instead of 
telling you what the play was about and the 
effect it had on the audience, gave you his "im- 
pressions" of the play. But now he just gives 
you his impressions: not his impressions of the 
play, but his impressions of anything: the Wo- 
man's Suffrage Movement — the Rocky Moun- 
tains. He need scarcely mention the play; but 
it is generally done. These impressions he will 
write in the obscure dialect of modern Oxford, 
which consists of a complicated kind of literary 
slang. He writes so carefully that it is impossible 
to know exactly what he means. He will begin 
by describing a journey he has just made; he 
will continue to give you his views on Henry 
James, or the principles of art, then he will sud- 
denly find after two columns of disquisition that 
he has come to the end of his space, and he will 
put off dealing with the play to the following 



98 Round the World in 

week. By that time he will have forgotten what 
he meant to be going to say, and he will be ob- 
liged to write a new disquisition on something 
else. That is how the " literary critic" deals with 
the drama to-day. I find no fault with the sys- 
tem. 

This is how the "literary" critic would deal 
with "Hamlet" were "Hamlet" a new play: — 

A Non-Conductor 

Last week I had a good deal to say about the 
possible effect of woman's suffrage on art, and this 
led me to disagree, as the French say, on the atti- 
tude of Aristophanes towards the woman question. 
The fault I have to find with Mr. Shakespeare's 
play which was produced tentatively at the Reper- 
tory Theatre in Wolverhampton last Tuesday, will 
be plainer when I have first explained the reason 
why Walt Whitman never wrote a play. 

Walt Whitman had probably the greatest unex- 
pressed dramatic gift of the century. He was the 
most potentially dramatic of all the modern poets: 
although his centrifugality led him out, so to speak, 
of his perspective, and shifted his dioramic outlook 



Any Number of Days 99 

from the psychologic-human to the devisualized- 
ideal. Yes, Whitman was perhaps the greatest 
dramatist who never wrote a play: with the pos- 
sible exception of Browning, who wrote plays which 
were in reality unbegun novels. Unlike Swinburne, 
whose system consisted of finishing his play before 
it began and filling up the space with deciduous 
phrases. Swinburne and Browning are the two 
great negative poles of drama: Whitman is the in- 
verted mute magnet, who repelled drama from him 
instead of attracting it. I will explain, and in order 
to explain, we must go back to the Indian drama; 
etc., etc., etc., etc., etc. 

Here, on the other hand, in contrast to this, 
is an example of the older impressionist method ; 
a short notice written in a cheap newspaper, by 
a critic who has not had time to see the last act, 
and to whom the manager has refused to give a 
sketch of the plot : — 

Hamlet: Puzzle-Play at the Pantheon 

Mr. Shakespeare is presumably a new writer. I 
don't remember having seen any of his work before, 
although it was rumoured last night that he had once 



ioo Round the World in 

been guilty of some sonnets. He may be able to 
write sonnets; but writing sonnets is one thing and 
writing a play is another. Not that there is no 
cleverness and no promise in "Hamlet"; but it is 
a literary cleverness, and not a dramatic cleverness. 

The play suffers from dullness, length, and want 
of action. There is far too much talk from begin- 
ning to end. And the talk is not dramatic. Mr. 
Shakespeare has made the unpardonable mistake 
of not making his intention clear. 

Is Hamlet, the hero of this rather disagreeable 
family imbroglio, meant to be mad, or is he meant 
to be simulating madness? Is the ghost a real ghost? 
Are we to take it seriously, or is it merely the prac- 
tical mystification of a royal buffoon? 

And what are we to think of the heroine? Is she 
really mad also? Or is her madness a literary device 
contrived so as to afford Mr. Shakespeare oppor- 
tunities for "lyricism" and incidental music? 
Either Mr. Shakespeare meant to write a serious 
tragedy on the subject of madness, or he meant to 
parody the prevalent mania for so-called psycho- 
logical studies: but the audience, being at a loss to 
know what he meant, was merely puzzled and bored. 
The actors did their best with their thankless task, 
and Mrs. Siddons, who celebrated her diamond 



Any Number of Days 101 

jubilee last Thursday, looked younger than ever in 
the somewhat ungrateful part of the peevish and 
provoking heroine. 

The upshot of all this digression is that I wish 
to excuse myself for having written at random 
by the exposition of current models and prece- 
dents. 

After a four days' voyage from Sydney, I have 
arrived at the other end of the world : Antipodes. 



Wellington : August 10 

It is the end of winter here, the beginning of 
spring; and colder, of course, than it is in Aus- 
tralia. The Wellington wind which you hear so 
much of you feel and hear a great deal as soon 
as you get up on to the hills. In the town I think 
you feel it less than one is told. 

Before sailing from London, five people told 
me that you can always tell a Wellington man 
because he holds on his hat when he walks round 
a corner of a street, because the wind blows 
round the corners. Everybody in the ship coming 
out, to whom I mentioned New Zealand, told 
me the story again, until at last I thought of 
having a small placard hanging round my neck 
with "I know how to tell a Wellington man" 
written on it, or "Don't tell me the story of the 
Wellington man and wind; I know it." 

The first thing that strikes an Englishman about 
the landscape of New Zealand is the absence of 




A WELLINGTON MAN TURNING A STREET CORNER 



Round the World 103 

atmosphere. The jagged hills stand out sharp 
against the clear sky like a photograph seen through 
a stereoscope. There are no half-lights, no melt- 
ing mist or wreathing haze, no vague distances. 

Another thing which strikes the stranger is 
the volcanic appearance of the hills and the soil. 
New Zealand is a tropical island cooled and made 
temperate by the neighbourhood of the South 
Pole. Wellington nestles among steep hills cov- 
ered with light-green grass and shorn of all trees. 
Its roofs are nearly all red. If you climb up a 
hill you see the view on either side of it, and the 
sea, very deep and blue. 

Not so very many years ago New Zealand was 
covered with bush; and the vegetation must 
have been riotously splendid, for what remains 
is very fine. 

My first walk in the country along the beach, 
where a very blue sea breaks over sharp brown 
rocks, and high cliffs stand out sharp and sheer, 
reminded me of South Devon. 



104 Round the World in 

My first long drive in the country reminded 
me of Russia, that is to say, of eastern Siberia 
and Transbaikalia. The little wooden one- 
storied houses, with red iron roofs and verandahs, 
might have been taken from Siberia. The sharp 
outline of the hills, the colour of the scrub, the 
clearness of the sky, all this is very much like 
what you see from the windows of the Trans- 
Siberian Railway. 

Another thing the stranger will notice immedi- 
ately is the limpidity of the streams and the water. 

Everybody tells me that this is the wrong time 
of year to be in New Zealand. One should be 
here in the summer: that is to say, in November 
and December. One should be able to camp out 
in the bush, by the great lakes, where the black 
swans sweep and wheel in the transparent after- 
glow. 

I shan't see all that, alas! because it is prac- 
tically winter now. I shall miss probably all the 
important sights. 



Any Number of Days 105 

In Wellington you see a great many private 
automobiles; very few public cabs and taxis. 
Most people use the tram-cars, which is much 
the most convenient way of getting about, let 
alone the cheapness. 

The first thing that strikes you in Wellington 
is the well-to-do-ness of everybody. There are no 
beggars; the workmen are all well off. The people 
seem quite extraordinarily happy. 



Near Palmerston : August 20 

I have spent four days in the country near 
Palmerston. As you travel in the train the coun- 
try is more like eastern Siberia than ever. In 
the distance you see a sharp range of blue hills, 
in the foreground a flat plain on which little 
squat one-storied wooden houses with red iron 
roofs are dotted about. 

The small provincial cities, too, are — as in 
Australia — very like the provincial towns in 
Russia. The streets are broad and the houses 
have verandahs. 

Another point of resemblance: the way the 
people ride. You meet children riding back from 
school, two on a pony. They seem to belong 
to the pony. They ride like little centaurs. This 
reminds me of the evenings in the plains of the 
Russian country, where one used to see the chil- 
dren of the village galloping off bareback on 
large horses and driving a lot of riderless horses 
to the river, to water them. 



Round the World 107 

As you drive in the country in New Zealand, 
the first thing you notice is the tall gum-trees, 
and whenever you get near the bush you hear 
the song of strange, unfamiliar birds. No native- 
born New Zealand bird has wings. 

Tfye New Zealanders are born footballers. 
You see the children playing everywhere. On 
every Saturday afternoon there is a big football 
match, and crowds of people look on. Rugby 
football is the national game of New Zealand, 
and I suppose the New Zealanders are the best 
players in the world. 

At the Athletic Park Ground you often see 
two matches going on at once. It is extremely 
difficult to watch two matches at once; because 
the moment you begin to watch something in the 
one, something interesting is sure to happen in 
the other. One would think, speaking as an 
outsider, that the Rugby game is far more inter- 
esting to look on at than the Association game. 



108 Round the World in 

But the Londoner does not think so. Every 
Saturday in London, and, indeed, all over Eng- 
land, thousands of people look on at the As- 
sociation game, and they care very much less 
for Rugby, which they consider to be a "toff's 
game." There is, they say, "too much shirt- 
tearing" about it for their taste. 

Rugby football in New Zealand has not yet 
been spoiled by professionalism. People think 
it is an honour to play for a team, and they are 
willing to travel and play all over the country 
for the honour of it, and without remuneration. 

In England professionalism has spoiled not 
only football but almost every other game, 
with the possible exception of "Old Maid," 
cribbage, and "My Bird Sings." 

The result is : — 

(i) People prefer looking on at games to play- 
ing them themselves. 

(2) They demand professionals and they bet 
on them. 



Any Number of Days 109 

(3) Some games become so professionally 
perfect that people no longer care to look 
on at them. 

The passion of the crowd in England for watch- 
ing football is looked upon by many people as 
the most ominous sign of national decadence, 
and as a manifestation resembling that of the 
gladiatorial shows in ancient Rome. They say 
it is this passion for watching, and for betting 
in the watching, that is responsible for the pre- 
valence of professionalism. In England one 
local club buys a celebrated player from an- 
other local club. Therefore, it is obvious that 
this is the death of any real local spirit. 

As for the games becoming so professional 
that people lose interest in them, this does not 
apply to football: but it does apply to cricket. 
In the last years there is in England a great 
falling-off in the public interest in cricket. The 
play has become so perfect that nobody cares 
to look at it. 



iio Round the World 

And even, or rather especially, at the schools 
in England, games have become ultra-profes- 
sional. 

All this is a pity, but it does not apply to New 
Zealand. New Zealand has, up to now, been 
unspoiled by professionalism. Long may it re- 
main so. One football enthusiast told me that 
the cloven hoof was making its appearance. 

What most people want to hear about New 
Zealand are facts with regard to the economic 
situation of the country : the labour question, the 
effects of woman's suffrage, the drink question, 
prohibition, etc. Now, unless one makes a really 
thorough and serious study of these questions, 
which it is impossible to do without devoting 
considerable time to it, without, in fact, living 
in the country for a reasonable period, it is worse 
than useless to fire off a few superficial and dog- 
matic generalizations. It is for this reason that 
I forbear from discussing them here. 



Wellington : September 

The first manifestations of the spring have 
taken the form of rain and wind. Whenever the 
wind is in the south, the weather is cold: for the 
wind comes straight from the South Pole. But 
luckily the rain does not last long. Changes 
of weather in New Zealand are very sudden. 
The hills are now covered with gorse in bloom. 
Daffodils are out everywhere; and in the town 
you see arum lilies that grow wild in New Zea- 
land in great profusion ; but I imagine their time 
is later. 

I am leaving the country just as the pleasant 
season is beginning, and I am leaving before I 
have had time to see the most interesting places 
in it. I have not seen New Zealand; but I have 
seen Wellington, and I have had a glimpse of 
the country. I have seen the Parliament sitting. 
I have met many interesting people. I have been 
to two concerts, one picture-show, one hospital, 



ii2 Round the World in 

one theatre, and four football matches. I have 
not been to one thing : and that is morning tea. 

Morning tea is, I believe, a custom peculiar 
to New Zealand. The New Zealanders give teas 
at eleven o'clock in the morning. 

Eleven o'clock in the morning is the time when 
one feels most exhausted. Refreshment of some 
kind at n A.M. is surely a need of human nature; 
and the New Zealanders have done well to crys- 
tallize the need into a tradition and a habit. 

Tea and whisky seem to be the national 
drinks of New Zealand — especially whisky. 
But tea is often drunk at meals. 

The impression that prevails in England that 
New Zealand is a place where you can't get any- 
thing to drink, is a false one. Of course, some of 
the cities in the country are under the ban of 
prohibition, and so are certain portions of Wel- 
lington itself: from these you have to cross the 
street into such territory as lies outside the ban. 
The railway cars are teetotal. 



Any Number of Days 113 

The people here often tell you that they are 
being over-legislated. And one notable New 
Zealander told me that what the country most 
needed was improvement in higher education. 
The people, he said, did not care for higher edu- 
cation. Their point of view was material. They 
would n't do things unless there was something 
to show for it. 

In Wellington there are four large, long streets 
full of shops, tall stone buildings, English in 
character, hotels, banks, etc., with verandahs 
covering the pavement the whole way, and cars 
running through them. Outside of these streets, 
the houses are mostly built of wood, and re- 
semble, as I have already said, those of a Rus- 
sian provincial town. 

The prices strike an Englishman as high, and 
the cost of living in New Zealand is undoubtedly 
high. The wages are, from our point of view, 
enormously high. A good chauffeur (I know of a 
case in point) can get £4 a week, and a house. 



114 Round the World in 

From the English point of view such wages are 
very high indeed. 

The New Zealanders strike me as being much 
more like English people than the Australians. 
Of course they have characteristics of their own. 
One thing is certain — a more friendly, hos- 
pitable people does not exist. 

To go into the matter of their institutions, 
life, etc., would need a far more prolonged study 
and stay than I have been able to make, and I 
have already said, three or four times, that I 
don't believe in pronouncing judgments on a 
country before you know it thoroughly. 

One of the most interesting people I have met 
here is a French lady of the highest culture and 
education, Sceur Marie Joseph, who is at the 
head of a Home of Compassion for derelict chil- 
dren. She went out to the Crimean War under 
Florence Nightingale and looked after the 
wounded on the battlefields that knew nothing 
of anaesthetics. She told me that sometimes the 



Any Number of Days 115 

doctors, after a day of surgical operations, would 
be drunk with the fumes of the blood. The 
wounded had to be tied down to be operated 
on, and sometimes, where this was not practi- 
cable, people had to sit on them to hold them 
down. 

Sceur Marie Joseph is very fond of New Zea- 
land. She came out, attracted by what she heard 
of the Maoris, and she knows the Maoris with an 
intimate thoroughness. She has a great admira- 
tion for them; and she gave me many instances 
of their chivalry and nobility of character. She 
has seen great changes since she has been in New 
Zealand. When she first came, she told me, New 
Zealand was covered with bush — that is to say, 
with magnificent forests; and the population, 
then, she says, was like one large family. 

This morning at one of the Catholic churches 
here the priest preached a most interesting ser- 
mon. Among other things he told the following 



116 Round the World 

story. He said, "The other day I met a man 
who said, 'I am a better Catholic than you are; 
because I go to all the churches: the Catholic, 
the Anglican, the Presbyterian, etc' " On the 
following Sunday the priest passed this same man 
as he was working in his garden, and he said to 
him, "You may go to all the churches, but you 
don't obey the precepts of any of them; for they 
all tell you not to work on Sunday." The man 
laughed. 

A few days after the priest met the man again 
in the town, and the man said to him: "I have 
just had the narrowest escape. I fell off a car 
and my legs were underneath it, and I was with- 
in an ace of being run over, when mercifully it 
stopped just in time." 

"Well," said the priest, "I think that was due 
to me, because, when I saw you working last 
Sunday, I prayed for the salvation of your 
legs." 



Roratonga and Tahiti: September 

I left Wellington on September 13 on the 
steamship Moana, one of the steamers belong- 
ing to the Union Steamship Company. 

There was a great deal of excitement at the 
send-off, because the Rugby Union Football 
Team from Australia were on board. They 
had come from Sydney and were on their way 
to San Francisco, in order to play against the 
local teams there. These football boys had ar- 
rived the day before, and had had a respite of 
twenty-four hours from the inclemency of the 
sea, which they had greatly enjoyed (the respite, 
I mean, not the sea). Some of them had never 
been away from Australia before. Several of 
them, or, indeed, nearly all of them with the 
exception of about seven, were indifferent sailors. 
They remained on shore as long as they possibly 
could, one of them climbing up the gangway as 
it was actually being pulled up. The ship sailed 
amidst cheering and singing. 



n8 Round the World in 

The southern Pacific, especially that part of 
it which is near New Zealand, is not a pleasant 
sea. The steamer pitched, and altogether the 
comfort of passengers was considerably inter- 
fered with during the first two days of the voy- 
age. We started on Friday, and owing to the 
change of time we had two Saturdays running. 
(Let mathematicians explain that if they can.) 
It was not until the Sunday which followed the 
two Saturdays that the sea began to be smooth 
enough to allow the passengers to behave like 
human beings instead of like half-inanimate 
corpses. 

On Sunday most of the football boys emerged 
from their cabins and began training on the 
upper deck. They boxed, they wrestled, they 
ran, they played leap-frog, they formed scrim- 
mages; in fact, they displayed every form of 
energy which human bones and muscles are cap- 
able of. 

The weather grew warmer, and on the Tuesday 



Any Number of Days 119 

we got to the southeast trade winds. The day 
after this the steamer called at the island of 
Roratonga. Roratonga is an island which con- 
sists of sharp and jagged little hills entirely cov- 
ered with a riotous green vegetation. 

In thinking of the South Sea Islands, and of 
tropical islands in general, if you have never 
seen them, one may not realise that the gen- 
eral appearance of them must necessarily be 
green, since they are entirely covered with vege- 
tation. One imagines a few palm-trees sticking 
up out of the sea, instead of a range of moun- 
tains covered with trees. As you first catch sight 
of Roratonga, you realise what New Zealand 
must have been like when it was covered with 
bush, only, of course, the climate of Roratonga 
is far milder and far warmer. The moment the 
steamer reaches Roratonga a great quantity of 
natives set out in boats from the shore and swarm 
on board. They are not black; they are not cop- 
per-coloured; they are a sort of dull almond 



120 Round the World in 

colour, with very black hair and very dark brown 
eyes. They wear large straw hats; some of them 
have flowers in their hair and behind their ears. 
As soon as you reach the shore the aspect 
of the island, which you might think disap- 
pointing at a distance, changes entirely. You 
are caught in a sort of warm embrace of aromatic 
deliciousness. Hibiscus bushes, with great scar- 
let blossoms, surround you on every side; cocoa 
palms, and all vegetation which you expect to 
see in a tropical island, are there before your 
eyes. But you will say, " If it is just the same as 
any other tropical island, what is the use of des- 
cribing it — if it is merely what one sees in the 
East? You have already spoken of Ceylon." 
Well, Rora tonga and the islands of the South 
Seas are not in the least like Ceylon, and they 
are not in the least like anything in the Near or 
Far East. They have a peculiar charm which is 
completely individual, and totally unlike any- 
thing else. The sights and the people of these 




NATIVES SWARMING ON BOARD 



Any Number of Days 121 

Southern places are utterly unlike the sights and 
people you see in the East — in Ceylon, for in- 
stance. There is nothing here of that hard, metal- 
lic element which you get in the East; nothing 
of that inscrutable mystery, that shadow of 
cruelty, which you feel in the Orient. The peo- 
ple are like the climate — soft and gentle; and 
they talk in musical tones, like the twittering of 
birds ; and their speech is careless as the laughing 
talk of children. They reminded me of that race 
of people whom H. G. Wells describes in his book 
"The Time Machine," that same people whom 
he imagines as living aboveground in the far, 
far distant future, when the industrial population 
of the world had grown into a sort of human 
flesh-eating lemur, which could only live under- 
ground and could only see in the dark. Mr. Wells 
represents the other and the civilized half of the 
population as having progressed or degenerated, 
whichever you like, into a race of childlike, ami- 
able, and playful little people, who live on fruit 



122 Round the World in 

in tumble-down houses, and who are as careless 
and irresponsible as butterflies. The people of 
Roratonga reminded me of this fancy of Mr. 
Wells's. 

At a little hotel where I stopped to eat some 
fresh bananas (and, oh, the difference between 
the fresh bananas and those which one buys at 
a store in Europe!) the woman who kept the 
hotel, and who had come from South Africa, 
talked of the natives. She said: " It is impossible 
to get them to work. If you find any fault with 
them they go away. It is we poor white people 
who have to do all the work. I would like," she 
said, "to shambok them as they do in South 
Africa, so lazy and impossible they are some- 
times, but we are not allowed to touch them. 
But then," she added, "of course one can't 
blame them, because they are quite well off with- 
out working. They have got enough to live on 
without doing any work." I thought that it 
would, indeed, be unreasonable to blame these 



Any Number of Days 123 

natives for not slaving for white people if they 
were not obliged to do so. The fact is that in these 
islands work for the natives is not a necessity; 
it is a hobby. It is to them what gardening must 
have been to Adam and Eve in the Garden of 
Eden, in the days before the Fall. If Adam and 
Eve gardened then, they gardened for fun. After 
the Fall of Man, they had to garden for a living 
and not from choice. Well, the native inhabitants 
of the South Sea Islands seem to have escaped 
or to be exempted from the primal curse; in 
fact, I believe that the islands of Tahiti and Rora- 
tonga are two bits of the Garden of Eden which 
were allowed to remain in the world so as to show 
mankind what they had lost by Eve's curiosity, 
Adam's disobedience, and the Devil's spite. 

We walked along the coast of this island up 
to the house of the missionary, where there was 
a large field. The football boys wanted to prac- 
tise. We certainly envied the missionary his 
house. It stood under a huge shelving hill cov- 



124 Round the World in 

ered with palm-trees, in a perfect labyrinth of 
flowers. When the boys began to play football, 
the natives came in great crowds and stood round 
chirping with delight like birds; and when the 
boys had finished practising, they threw the 
football to the natives and told them they might 
play. At first, the natives fought shy of the 
football, — I imagine that they thought they 
would have to play against these terrifically 
efficient and muscular representatives of New 
South Wales; but when they realised that the 
boys did not want to play with them, and that 
they could play among themselves, they took 
to the game with great eagerness, and were soon 
enjoying themselves greatly. It was curious 
that by just looking on they had picked up a 
very good idea of the game, the main features 
of which they mimicked with some skill; one 
little boy was an excellent tackier. 

One was struck by the extraordinarily musi- 
cal quality of their voices and their language, 



Any Number of Days 125 

which consists almost entirely of soft open 
vowels, and which is, I suppose, the most melo- 
dious of all human languages. 

Before going back to the steamer, which was 
to sail in a few hours, I bathed in the sea, in a 
warm azure sea, and then, after eating more 
bananas and a delicious bitter fruit called "Bra- 
zilian cherries," I went on board once more. 

From Roratonga it only takes two days to get 
to the island of Tahiti, and the steamer anchored 
at Papeete on Friday, the 20th September. 

Roratonga gives you a kind of foretaste of the 
whole charm and beauty of the South Seas. It 
is the appetizer, the hors-d'ceuvre, not the whole 
meal. Tahiti is the whole thing; the real thing; 
the thing one has dreamt about all one's life; the 
thing which made Stevenson leave Europe for- 
ever. All tellers of fairy tales, and all poets from 
Homer downwards, have always imagined the 
existence of certain islands which were so full 
of magic and charm that they turned man from 



126 Round the World in 

his duty and from all tasks, labour, or occupation 
in which he was engaged, and held him a willing 
captive, who would not sell his captivity for all 
the prizes of the busy world. 

Stevenson in one of his books — "The 
Wrecker," I think — says that if a man who was 
toiling in some English town were to be suddenly 
transported to one of the South Sea Islands, in 
the neighbourhood of Tahiti, and had a vision 
of the beauty that is there, and then were to be 
transported back again to his prosaic and ugly 
surroundings, he would say, "At any rate, I 
have had my dream." That is how one feels 
when one has seen Tahiti. One feels one has had 
one's dream. 

The Bay of Papeete curves inward. As you 
sail into it you are sure to see several white 
schooners at anchor. At one side is a range of 
light-blue volcanic hills stretching out into the 
crystalline sea, reminding one of Naples, Capri, 
and Sorrento, and in the middle of the bay there 



Any Number of Days 127 

is a tiny little island, consisting of a few cocoa 
palms. The sea is a transparent azure; little 
white houses are dotted all along the line of the 
beach, nestling in greenery. We got there in the 
afternoon and landed at once. We walked along 
the beach into the little town, and into the sub- 
urbs of it. It was spring in Tahiti, and every 
kind of imaginable blossom was flaunting its 
reckless and extravagant beauty. Everything 
grows wild in Tahiti. Nobody seems to bother 
about gardening or anything of that kind. It 
is not only the lilies who do not toil and spin, 
but the gardeners also. The unaided results of 
nature are so prodigious that the imagination 
is staggered to think of what might be done 
supposing an energetic gardener were let loose 
in these islands and allowed to try experiments. 
He would produce such a garden as the world 
has never seen. 

I scarcely knew the names of any of the fruits 
or any of the blossoms which I saw. There were 



128 Round the World in 

mango-trees, laden with mangoes which were 
not yet ripe; bamboo - trees, breadfruit - trees, 
cocoa palms, banana-trees, hibiscus bushes, a tree 
with a bright pink blossom which looked like 
a Judas-tree, but which was not one, bushes with 
intense mauve- and deep lilac-coloured flowers, 
and broad avenues of large green trees which 
shaded the road from the hot sun with great 
fanlike branches. As we walked along this ave- 
nue, on both sides of which there are little houses, 
we caught glimpses of wonderfully luxuriant and 
untrained gardens. 

There seemed to be no birds except blackbirds 
and mina birds, which were hopping about in 
great quantities. 

The people seem extraordinarily contented 
and invincibly indolent. I was walking along 
the main street and I wanted to get to the post- 
office, which I knew was somewhere along that 
street. I stopped at a store and asked whether 
I was going the right way. The storekeeper — 



Any Number of Days 129 

who was a Frenchman — said, yes, I was 
going right. I then asked if it was far. The 
storekeeper said, oh, yes, it was very far; in- 
deed, it would take me a good quarter of an hour 
or twenty minutes to walk there. I asked him 
if I could hire a conveyance, as I was in a hurry. 
He shook his head and thought it unlikely. I 
then went on my way. I thought I would just 
time myself and see how long it did take to reach 
the post-office. I walked fast; but I found, to 
my amazement, that it took me exactly three 
minutes to get there. Doubtless it would have 
taken a native of Tahiti twenty minutes. There 
is no such thing as hurry and no such thing as 
energy in these islands. 

At five o'clock in the evening the football boys 
gave a display in front of the Governor's house, 
and crowds of natives witnessed it. After that 
we all went to bathe in the bay, where sharks 
rarely come, although they do come sometimes. 

In the evening we went to a picture-show, 



130 Round the World in 

where there was a boxing-match between some 
native champions. 

The people say that if you once drink of the 
water of Tahiti you will be bound to go there 
again, and I do not wonder at this. It is cer- 
tainly the most fascinating and most beautiful 
spot I have ever seen. Its fascination lies not 
so much in the profusion and wealth of luxuri- 
ant vegetation and exotic colouring as in its 
subtle and indescribable charm. You do not 
feel as if you were in a hothouse. You feel as if 
you were in a most delicious country. You walk 
along by the side of streams where you see peo- 
ple doing their washing; you hear the cry of 
poultry; you see people driving oxen along the 
shady road. There is a wonderful fragrance in 
the air. Schooners come into the harbour from the 
other islands: the Marquesas Islands, etc. The 
Europeans walking about in their white clothes 
do not look like the Europeans you see in Ceylon, 
all washed out and wearied from the heat and 



Any Number of Days 131 

strain; they look as if they were enjoying life, 
as if they were happy where they were. 

There is a large Chinese population in Tahiti, 
but they busy themselves for the most part with 
agriculture. They do not do much work for the 
white people. The labour problem in Tahiti is 
consequently very vexatious for the white peo- 
ple. It is difficult to get work done at all; there- 
fore, life in Tahiti is expensive. Often, for 
instance, the natives on market-day will bring 
no meat to the market, because it bothers them 
to do so. Of course, if white people consented to 
live entirely on fruit, as the natives do, the ques- 
tion would be solved, and certainly the fruit 
there is excellent. But man cannot live by bread- 
fruit alone. He insists on sucking-pig and other 
more substantial delicacies; and to get these, in 
Tahiti, he has to pay money. 

There is practically only one small hotel in 
Tahiti, a little two-storied house with a verandah. 
There are many French stores; the Governor's 



132 Round the World in 

House; the post-office; and a theatre. When the 
Panama Canal is opened, steamers, I suppose, 
will call at Tahiti in greater numbers than they 
do now, and that will be the time for speculators 
to build a larger hotel there. I have no fears of 
Tahiti ever being spoiled. It is the kind of place 
that will conquer civilization rather than be 
conquered by it. It was, at present, — I was 
told by people who had visited all the islands 
in the Pacific, — the most unspoiled of all of 
them. That is why I chose that route. Fiji is 
far more progressive, and I dare say far more 
satisfactory from a business and European point 
of view, but it is less interesting from a pictur- 
esque point of view. 

I cannot imagine anything more ideal than to 
possess a schooner fitted with a small motor, 
in case of calm, and to cruise about the waters 
between Tahiti and the Marquesas, which, one 
is told, are indescribably beautiful. 

I understand why Stevenson liked the South 



Any Number of Days 133 

Seas above all things. I also understand why 
he was so loath to write descriptive articles about 
them. They are things to be seen ; they are places 
to be seen and lived in; not to be written about. 
The pen can give no idea of their charm. Steven- 
son does it in his stories, and so does another 
well-known author, Louis Becke, who is rightly 
supposed to be the best writer of fiction on the 
South Seas. 

It is possible now to take trips to the Marque- 
sas from Tahiti in trading schooners, but I be- 
lieve that is not a comfortable manner of trans- 
port. The thing would be to have a schooner 
of one's own, — not an auxiliary schooner, be- 
cause a schooner which is provided with steam 
ceases to be a sailing-vessel: the sails are never 
used; but a schooner fitted with a motor would 
ensure one against being becalmed, and, at the 
same time, the motor would not compete with 
and finally defeat the sails. 

Lying at anchor in Papeete Harbour, there was 



134 Round the World in 

a magnificent sailing-vessel which had come from 
San Francisco. It may not be very long before 
such vessels cease to exist altogether. Every 
day wind-jammers are being turned into steam- 
ers, and sailing-vessels become fewer and fewer. 
It is a melancholy fact for those who love the 
sea. 

We stayed at Papeete only twenty-four hours. 
If you stay longer than that, you have to stay 
there a month, because the steamers only call 
there once a month. Tahiti is not connected by 
cable with any other country. Loath as I was to 
go, at the end of the twenty-four hours I felt it 
was a good thing that I was doing so; otherwise 
I should have been tempted to remain there for 
the rest of my life. Apart from other things, the 
climate is intoxicatingly pleasant; hot, but not 
too hot; prodigal, at sunset, of the most gorgeous 
effects of color and light; indescribably wonder- 
ful in the night-time. 

The most beautiful spots in Tahiti are inland 



Any Number of Days 135 

in the island, and it would take about a month 
to see the place properly. Papeete possesses 
three public automobiles for hire. I tried the 
whole of the morning on the day we left to get 
one of them, but they had all gone out. Apart 
from this, there are a few little carriages which 
act as cabs, driven by Chinamen, but they appear 
to go to sleep in the daytime, and only appear in 
the evening. The result was one had to walk 
about on one's feet the whole time, and at the 
end of the morning I did not wonder that the 
inhabitants of this island are disinclined to make 
strenuous efforts. It is the kind of place where 
you are perfectly satisfied to do nothing. That 
morning, nevertheless, was one of the most en- 
joyable I have ever spent. I walked up and down 
the streets, looking again and again at the gor- 
geous-coloured blossoms and the wonderful green 
trees. 

Between the hours of eleven and one o'clock 
the stores shut, and the business of life is inter- 



136 Round the World in 

rupted for the midday meal and subsequent 
repose. 

We left Tahiti in the afternoon, when the 
greater part of the population came down to the 
wharf to see us off. We left feeling like Ulysses 
when he was driven by force from the island of 
Calypso. And I for one, in any case, felt that 
come what might, I had had my dream. I had 
had a glimpse of Eden, a peep into the earthly 
paradise. 

I have seen many of the beautiful corners of 
the world. A lake in Manchuria covered with 
large pink lotus flowers, as delicate as the land- 
scape on a piece of Oriental china. 

I have seen Linfa, the deserted ruin of the 
Roman Campagna, rising from waters thick 
with water-lilies, and a wilderness of leaves, like 
a castle which an enchanter has bade go to sleep 
for hundreds of years. 

I have seen, in the Scilly Isles, that island 
which is a white garden set in the bluest of seas. 



Any Number of Days 137 

I have seen Capri, and the Greek Islands, and 
Brusa in Asia Minor in the spring, when the 
nightingales sing all day, and the roses are in full 
bloom, and the noise of running water is forever 
in your ears. 

But never have I seen anything so captivating 
as Tahiti, as those long shady walks, those great 
green trees, that reckless, untutored glory of 
blossom and foliage, those fruits, those flowers, 
and the birdlike talk of those careless natives, 
who wreathe themselves with flowers, and are 
happy without working, and who put scarlet 
flowers behind their ears to signify they are going 
to enjoy themselves: to have a good time; to 
paint the town red. 

In Tahiti there are no snakes, and in this re- 
spect at least Tahiti is superior to the Garden of 
Eden, equal to. Ireland. 



Across the Pacific: September 21 — 
October 3 

In describing the voyage across the Pacific 
(in "The Wrecker"), Stevenson says that there 
are certain periods in life which leave behind 
them a kind of roseate haze on the map of one's 
existence. You cannot remember the details; 
you are merely conscious of a kind of pleasant 
blur. I feel the same thing about my voyage from 
Tahiti to San Francisco, but I have not yet for- 
gotten and shall never forget the details. That 
voyage stands out for me like a kind of bath 
which had the power of restoring one's youth 
for the time being. The trade winds blew freshly 
the whole time. There was a breeze even when 
we crossed "the line." It was tropically warm, 
and yet never for one hour too hot. It was only 
at the end of the voyage that the freshness was 
overdone, that the weather grew cold, and the 
sea too rough for comfort; otherwise the weather 



Round the World 139 

was perfect. The huge clouds of the Pacific 
chased one another across the sky, as Stevenson 
describes them — "blotting out the stars" at 
night, and making fantastic citadels in the 
sunset. 

Apropos of the stars in the tropics, one is al- 
ways told that there is no twilight in these 
regions. This is not quite an accurate way of 
expressing it. What is accurate, is Coleridge's 
line in "The Ancient Mariner," when he says, 
"The Sun's rim dips; the stars rush out." He 
adds, "At one stride comes the dark." The 
moment the sun goes down, you do see the stars 
at once; but the darkness that comes is not dark; 
the red afterglow down on the horizon, and above 
it the luminous mauve haze, which is peculiar 
to the tropics, lingers a long time, and against 
this the great shapes of the clouds stand out 
inky and black. It is a wonderful sight. 

The football boys used to train twice a day. 
A large swimming-bath, made out of a sail, had 



140 Round the World in 

been fixed up on the deck, so that after toy- 
ing with a little amateur training, one could 
take off one's clothes and splash about in the 
salt water. I do not think I ever enjoyed baths 
so much. 

In the afternoon many of us used to take sun- 
baths, and lie half stripped on the upper deck 
in the sun, till our skin turned first red and then 
brown. At Sydney everybody takes these sun- 
baths, and this accounts for the bronzed com- 
plexion of the Australians. 

The football boys had appetites which I have 
rarely seen equalled and never seen surpassed. 

When I was at school at Eton, there was a 
phrase which was peculiar to the place, namely, 
"a brazier" (I am not certain that this is the 
right spelling). "A brozier" or "to brozier" 
meant when the boys ate all the food provided 
for them and clamored for more, until there was 
nothing left in the house. 

There was, once upon a time, a much-vener- 



Any Number of Days 141 

ated lady at Eton, called Miss Evans, who ruled 
over a house of boys. One day the boys settled 
on "a brozier," and ate everything in the house, 
but Miss Evans was not to be defeated. She 
produced a large, evil-smelling cheese, and set 
it before the boys, and this cheese defeated them. 
The football boys seemed capable of doing 
this every day, and the stewards were walked off 
their feet by the amount of fetching and carry- 
ing of dishes which they had to perform. As 
soon as the bugle blew, one heard a stampede of 
feet going down to the saloon. One felt inclined 
to quote Browning's celebrated poem, and say, — 

"Dinner's at seven — 
All 's right with the world." 

It is a curious thing that I got to know more 
about Australia and New Zealand after having 
left it than I did when I was there, by the pres- 
ence and companionship of these football boys 
from New South Wales. Most of them were 
Australians, some had come from New Zealand. 



142 Round the World in 

Besides being some of the best amateur football 
players in the world, they were the very best of 
good fellows, and to live with them was like being 
transported back again to Oxford or Cambridge 
and the days of one's youth. 

After dinner in the evening choruses used to 
be sung, and singing in chorus is the crown of 
good-fellowship. 

In the eighteenth century in England, when- 
ever people met together to eat, drink, and enjoy 
themselves, they sang. Song, alas, is now dying 
out of modern England, but it still lingers in 
the haunts of the young. Very few people now 
write drinking-songs, and this surely testifies to 
a lamentable decay in our morals. 

I shall always be thankful to this trip for 
having afforded me a better glimpse of the new 
world, which I obtained through the compan- 
ionship of these fine sons of Australia and New 
Zealand, than I might have obtained by living 
for months in Wellington or Sydney, because on 



Any Number of Days 143 

board a small ship one gets to know people 
far more intimately than one does anywhere 
else, and it is by getting to know people that you 
arrive at an understanding of a country. It is 
not through sight-seeing that you get to know a 
country ; it is through getting to know its people 
well, and through getting to know the right sort 
of people. 



San Francisco: October 3 

There is no subject in the world more hack- 
neyed than American impressions. Nearly every 
month a writer of note discovers America over 
again. In spite of this, I am told, there is no 
stuff that is more eagerly read in the States, and 
outside of them, than impressions of America 
written by a foreigner. It does n't seem to matter 
whether such impressions are written by a writer 
of renown, such as H. G. Wells or Arnold Ben- 
nett, or by a totally unknown tourist; it does not 
matter whether they are well written or ill writ- 
ten, whether they are serious or flippant, amus- 
ing or dull; they are certain to be read. 

I think I can understand the reason of this. 
People in any country like to read about them- 
selves. They like to look upon their own image 
as it is reflected in the mirror of foreign observers. 

It does not much matter what the mirror is like, 
so long as the image is there. There is no book 



Round the World 145 

of impressions of England, for instance, that I 
could not read with interest. 

Nevertheless, all this does not make the task 
of writing about America to an American public 
any easier. If one is writing exclusively for one's 
own native public, the task is not so difficult. 
One can describe an American hotel, for instance, 
a train, a tram-car; one can tell how one is 
shaved and how one's boots are blacked; but 
the American public knows that already. So the 
task resolves itself into this: one has to write 
about things which are intimately familiar to 
the public one is addressing, in such a manner 
as to make it possible for them to read what one 
writes without being tired to death and throw- 
ing the book at some one's head. 

This being so, I revolve in my mind the dif- 
ferent methods which could be applied to the 
task. First of all, there is the method to which 
I have already alluded, and in some cases used 
in these notes: the method of not writing about 



146 Round the World in 

America at all, but about something else. You 
would begin writing like this: "The day I ar- 
rived at San Francisco, I was thinking about 
Venice," and then you would write a chapter on 
Venice. But I do not think people would stand 
this. 

Then you could use the manner of Bernard 
Shaw. You could write a "discussion" on Amer- 
ica in three acts, in which an aeronaut, a milliner, 
a Salvation Army girl, a capitalist, a High- 
Church clergyman, and a lady Socialist would 
sit round a table and discuss America. 

You would begin with a preface on trusts, 
Italian opera, vivisection, submarines, and prize- 
fighting. Then you would get to the discussion. 
This would be prefaced by five pages of stage- 
directions, with regard to the room in which the 
discussion was to take place. Then one of the 
characters would enter, and there would be two 
pages of stage-directions in very small print 
about the facial expression, the clothes, the boots, 



Any Number of Days 147 

the watch, the cigarette-case of that character. 
Then the character would do a little business, — 
open the window, perhaps, or shut it. More 
characters would enter, heralded by more stage- 
directions. Then the characters, having sat down, 
would discuss America, and incidentally every 
other country under the sun, especially England. 
The discussion would be forbidden by the 
censorship in England, because one of the charac- 
ters would be called Askfour, and this would be 
considered allusion to 

(a) Mr. Asquith 

(b) Mr. Balfour 

(c) Sir George Askwith (on account of the 
"k");- 

and so the discussion would be acted in the Little 
Theatre at New York, and in London by the 
State Society on Sunday evenings. 

Then I might adopt the method of Pierre Loti. 
This is called the "dot-and-dash" method. It 
is like the Morse code made poetic. You begin 



148 Round the World in 

a sentence and leave it unfinished, adding a lot 
of dots like this : — 

New York 

I am in New York-. - . . .but I am not think- 
ing of New York ..-....- I am thinking of some- 
thing else. . . . - . .the other places the East 

the desert Stamboul 

Ispahan Sadi 

(Then a whole line of dots.) 

(Then you begin again.) 

I am in New York tall buildings 

rise wistful and white in the pale milky sky 

They are very tall, those buildings They 

affect me with a strange longing to go away 

to be somewhere else anywhere else 

not here. . . .There where? Beyond. . 



Translate that into French, and you get the 
Loti-Morse method. 

Then there is the Masefield method. That 
would consist in writing an enormously long 
poem about the Bowery, in verse full of exple- 




VERY FEW WRITERS THINK WHEN THEY ARE WRITING 



Any Number of Days 149 

tives, oaths, and tough adjectives, called "Street- 

pity." 

" Take that, and that, and go to Hell. 
Hell, Hell, Hell, Hell." 

On reflection, I reject all these methods. I will 
leave the matter to my pen. 

The only way to write is to let the pen do the 
work, like what happens in planchette (except 
when somebody cheats) . Very few writers think 
before they write or even when they are writing ; 
they let their pen guide their thoughts. And I 
am certain that those writers who write too much 
suffer from a disease of the fingers and not of the 
brain. 

Before saying a word about America, I apolo- 
gize for anything I shall say which may sound 
or be absurd. 

A wit once said that the American and Eng- 
lish people had everything in common, except, 
of course, the language. There is, I think, a 
great deal of truth in this: the words are the 



150 Round the World in 

same, but they mean different things and they 
are used in different ways. 

Some day, when I have learned the American 
language properly, I mean to write a large book 
on the American language. In the mean time, 
the following condensed grammar for foreign- 
ers may prove useful for Americans going to 
England, as well as for Englishmen going to 
America: — 

Chapter I 

I Rule I. (Very important.) Whenever you say 
"in" in English say either "on" or "to" 
in American. 

(Note that all English people say, "on 
a ship," except British naval officers. If 
you say, "on a ship," to a British naval 
officer, — if, for instance, you say, "Jones 
is on the Dreadnought," he will get very 
angry and correct you, and say, "in the 
Dreadnought.") 

There are one hundred and twenty-six 
exceptions to this rule, the most important 
of which is this: — 



Any Number of Days 151 

"To be in trouble" is not translated "to 
be on trouble" in American. 
Rule II. The two most important words in Ameri- 
can are "proposition" and "stunt." 

Everything is either a proposition or a 
stunt. 

There are no other rules. 

Exercise 
Translate the following story into American: — 
THE MOUSE AND THE LION 

Once upon a time a Mouse went and trod on a 
Lion who was asleep. The Lion, who had been late 
in going to bed the night before (translate "had a 
hang-over"), woke up, and after saying, "Bother 
you," seized the Mouse, and prepared to eat it. 

But the Mouse, who was as brave as a mouse, 
said, "Let me go, you son of a Lioness; perhaps 
some day I may do you a good turn." 

The Lion, having laughed the Mouse to scorn, 
let it go, saying: "A Mouse do a Lion a good turn. 
How witty!" 

Some time afterwards, some hunters caught the 
Lion, and put it into a large net. 

The Mouse, which happened to be there, hearing 



i5 2 



Round the World in 



the Lion groan, came and nibbled away the net 
(translate "got busy"), until the Lion was free. 

"Don't you remember," said the Mouse, "my 
telling you that I might some day do you a good 
turn? You see how right you were not to eat me 
then." 

"Yes, that's true," said the Lion, and it ate the 
Mouse. 



Conversation 



Did you hand the gardener's 
niece a lemon? 

Where is the son of the stock- 
broker? 

What is the son of the stock- 
broker doing on the street? 

Will the son of the stockbroker 
be stung? 

Is the son of the stockbroker a 
cooker? 

Did the son of the baker call 
the son of the cook a four- 
flusher? 

Did the cousin of the carpenter 
make the brother-in-law of 
the blacksmith look like 30 
cents? 

Is it up to you to put it over 
him? 

Did the son of the banker, when 
his father gave him his bless- 
ing for a birthday present, 
say it was a two-spot on the 
show-down? 



No, but I threw a bouquet at 
the brother of the carpenter. 
He is on the street. 

The son of the stockbroker is 

looking for hens' teeth. 
Yes, good and plenty. 

No, the son of the stockbroker 

is a quitter. 
No, he called him a son of a 

gun. 

No, he got his. 



Sure, Mike. 

Yes, and he said the gent was a 
piece of cheese. 



Any Number of Days 153 



Can you see anything to the Yes, $5,100,000. 

daughter of the money-lender? 

Did the second cousin of the No, the second cousin of the 

tough get outside four bottles? tough has been on the water- 
wagon for three moons. 

Is the nephew of the crook a No, the nephew of the crook is a 

booze-fighter? Bull-Mooser. 

Will the uncle of the stockbroker No, the uncle of the stockbroker 

lend me fifty dollars? is a tight-wad. 



What differentiates the arrival at an American 
port or city from the arrival at the port or city 
of any other country is that in America you 
will find a whole lot of people who are there to 
meet your wants and your need. When you 
arrive in any foreign country, you are necessarily 
ignorant of nearly all those things which it is 
essential you should know. Now, in most coun- 
tries you find nobody to help deal with that ig- 
norance and to help you out of a situation created 
by it. In America, on the other hand, you will 
find a whole lot of people who are there to find 
out what you want to do, and to help you to do it 
in the most convenient and quickest way. They 
make a business of it. It pays them and it helps 



154 Round the World in 

you. It pays them to help you better than some 
one else helps you. 

I have met in England quite a lot of people 
who are frightened at the thought of going to 
America, because they feel so ignorant of the 
conditions obtaining there. They need feel no 
such alarm. They will find a crowd of people 
competing among themselves as to who can best 
put them in the way of what they want to do. 
For instance, when I arrived at San Francisco, 
agents came on board the ship from all of the 
different railway lines, each of which was ready 
to fix up your journey for you and do anything 
you wanted. Each railway line wants you to 
travel by their line, so each line makes it his 
business that you should have every possible 
inducement to do so. 

When I arrived at San Francisco, I thought I 
might have to proceed on my journey that same 
night, but I also wanted to get some money from 
the bank. I had arrived after the closing-time 



Any Number of Days 155 

of banks. In any other country this would have 
been an insuperable obstacle in the way of getting 
money. In San Francisco, not at all. The repre- 
sentative of the Santa Fe Line, which I wished to 
travel by, immediately took me to an office 
where I could get money on presentation of my 
letter of credit. The whole business was fixed 
up in about ten minutes; in most other countries 
it takes about half a day to draw on a letter of 
credit in a bank; it is quite impossible to draw 
on it after business hours. 

As a matter of fact, I did not proceed on my 
journey that night. Here, again, there was no 
difficulty in cancelling my sleeping-berth. 

All these things, which are a matter of course 
to the American, are unheard of in European 
countries. Nobody in Europe has made it a fine 
art to meet the convenience of travellers, with 
the exception, of course, of Messrs. Cook & Son; 
but when Cook's office is closed, it is closed, and 
nothing can open it. In America, as far as I can 



156 Round the World in 

see, nothing is ever completely closed. There 
will always be somebody somewhere to get you 
what you want. 

In San Francisco, to-day, it is difficult to de- 
tect any traces of the fire which followed the 
earthquake. The enormous high buildings look 
as if they had always been there. 

I drove to the hotel — the St. Francis — after 
having finished my business in the city, in a taxi. 
This is an expensive thing to do, but practically 
the only time you need do it is when you are 
coming from the boat. In spite of this, one some- 
times wishes that taxis in America were cheaper. 
I think there is only one country in the world 
where it is within the means of the really poor 
to hire a cab, and that is — Russia. A poor man 
can take a cab just as easily as a rich man there, 
because there is no standard charge. The charge 
depends on the cabman, and sometimes he will 
drive you for almost nothing. I have often seen 
extremely poor people take cabs in Russia. 



Any Number of Days 157 

In Moscow, the cab-drivers very often own 
their cabs. They bargain with you before you 
get into the cab, as to the price of the drive, and 
if the driver does not agree to your price, he will 
not drive you. 

New York, I suppose, is the only city now 
where hansom cabs still exist. In London, the 
only place where you can find one is the British 
Museum. 

The first thing that struck me in San Fran- 
cisco, and in America altogether, was the archi- 
tecture. Many years ago, when I was in Flor- 
ence, I was present in the house of a famous 
picture expert, when he and some well-known 
archaeologists were discussing architecture, and 
some one who was present said he wondered 
whether there would ever be a Renaissance in 
architecture. One of the archaeologists present 
said that this Renaissance was already happen- 
ing in America. 

I do not think there are any modern buildings 



158 Round the World in 

in Europe which can compare with the modern 
buildings in America. But apart from such mas- 
terpieces as the Pennsylvania Railroad Station, 
Pierpont Morgan's library, and the wonderful 
towers and skyscrapers in New York, it struck 
me that all the little houses you saw everywhere 
in the country round San Francisco and along 
the Sante Fe Railway track, and again in Long 
Island, were remarkable for their symmetry, 
their good proportions, and their daintiness. 
For instance, the country in New Zealand is 
covered with little bungalows; so is the country 
round San Francisco ; but the difference between 
them is immense. There is no elegance or pretti- 
ness about the bungalows in New Zealand; they 
are heavy, unshapely, and monotonous; there 
is no taste or design about them; while in San 
Francisco, on the contrary, they are extremely 
varied, remarkable for their proportion, attrac- 
tive-looking, and often extremely pretty. I be- 
lieve that in the American character there is a 



Any Number of Days 159 

deep sense of symmetry, shape, and neatness. 
I think there are evidences of this in all depart- 
ments of American life : in the clothes of the men 
and women; in their neatness; in the quickness 
and neatness of their phrases and their humour ; 
in the ingenuity of their machinery. There is 
a constant tendency to do away with what is 
unnecessary. In the finest American buildings 
what strikes one most is the absence of unneces- 
sary ornamentation and detail of architect's 
"twiddles," which, in England, for instance, it 
is impossible to get architects to leave out, do 
what you will. 

The Pennsylvania Railroad Station and Pier- 
pont Morgan's library have the simplicity of 
Greek architecture. 

To go back again to San Francisco, the climate 
is like champagne. There is gaiety in the air. 
The streets and the houses seem to radiate with 
amusement and cheerfulness. San Francisco is 
essentially a night city, and next to Paris, I 



160 Round the World in 

should say it was the gayest night city in the 
world. 

I have met with a great deal of hospitality all 
over the world, but I have never met with peo- 
ple who take so much trouble for the stranger 
as the Americans. A friend of mine in New York 
met a friend of his, and asked this friend if he 
had any acquaintances in San Francisco, and 
if so, whether they could do anything for me. 
This friend of my friend's immediately sent a lot 
of telegrams to San Francisco, the result of which 
was that I instantly received cards of invitation 
to three different clubs, and that I was, that very 
night, entertained at the Pacific Union Club. 

Here again was an example of beautiful archi- 
tecture. The club is the last word of luxury, but 
the luxury is subordinate to taste and design. 
It is not over-ornamented. When new clubs are 
built in England, for the sheer purpose of luxury, 
such as, for instance, the Automobile Club, the 
result is ramshackle, shoddy, pretentious, and 



Any Number of Days 161 

hideous. There is nothing solid about it in taste 
or in design — merely luxurious gaudiness. I do 
not think there is in the whole of the world a 
club to compare in luxury, solid comfort, and 
fine proportion with the San Francisco Pacific 
Union. The food is as excellent as the archi- 
tecture. 

I was also taken to the Bohemian Club, which 
is famous for its great yearly entertainment in 
the redwood region. 

There is also a wonderful home of athletics, 
which I visited, called the Olympic Club, which 
has not long been built. It contains every kind 
of bath you can imagine, and an enormous salt- 
water swimming-bath. It is the kind of bath 
you can imagine the ancient Romans built for 
themselves, and, indeed, American cities lead 
one to think that in many respects they are like 
ancient Rome: the quantity of marble employed; 
the detailed supply which is ever present to meet 
the demands and the needs of the individual. 



162 Round the World in 

During my second day in San Francisco, I 
was taken by a friend to see a ranch. We went 
by train, and then drove in a machine over the 
beautiful hills, right into the heart of the coun- 
try. There is no country more beautiful than 
California. At this moment, although no rain 
had fallen for some time, the green was still 
vivid, the colours of the foliage mellow and soft 
and indescribably varied. The atmosphere of the 
hills softened the tints, and the harmony of colour 
was soft and gorgeous. 

Riding back we passed through Stanford Uni- 
versity, which possesses in its university build- 
ings a striking example of American genius for 
architecture. 

Next day I went to see the Australian Football 
Team play a local team. I do not think the 
American public is very highly interested in 
Rugby football, judging from the gate, which 
was not a very good one, as the introduction of 
the Rugby game in America is comparatively 



Any Number of Days 163 

recent. The local team played very well, but 
they did not seem familiar with some of the rules. 
The Australian boys had not yet recovered from 
their journey; nevertheless, they won. 

After the match was over, I drove back with 
them to the Olympic Club, where they bathed. 

The next day I went with some friends, first 
by ferry across the bay, then by train, till we 
reached the hills. We climbed up into the hills, 
where great vistas of gorgeous scenery lay be- 
neath one, and then, walking down into the val- 
ley, we wandered about amongst the trunks of 
the huge topless redwood. A mountain railway 
took us down to the level again. 

No words can describe the glory of the Cali- 
fornia scenery when you get up into these hills, 
which are covered with woods, and nothing can 
give you any idea of the sweetness and the fresh- 
ness of the air there. 

The next night I left San Francisco for Chi- 
cago. Before leaving San Francisco, I had dinner 



164 Round the World in 

at a restaurant called the "New Franks." It is 
a small restaurant, and it provides the best 
food I have ever eaten anywhere. When people 
speak in this way of a restaurant, they often 
mean that they happened on that day to be 
hungry and to have a good appetite. I was not 
hungry the night I went to the New Franks. I 
was- not inclined to eat, but the sheer excellence 
of the cooking there excited my greed, and bade 
my appetite rise from the dead. 

The cooking was perfect. There is no other 
word for it. When I say the cooking was perfect, 
I mean the food was perfectly cooked. I don't 
mean that there were dozens of messy entrees 
and highly spiced sauces. The food was of the 
simplest. I had soup (soup a Voignon, a dream!), 
fish, and chicken, and I never tasted anything 
so good in my life. 

Anatole France tells somewhere the story of 
a king, who, powerful as he was (or rather just 
because he was all-powerful), was condemned 



Any Number of Days 165 

to the luxury of a huge kitchen and a huge staff 
of cooks, who served him up elaborate tasteless 
dishes which meant nothing to him. And this 
was sad, adds Anatole France, for he liked good 
food (Car il aimait la bonne chere). 

He would have found it at the New Franks, 
which is under the direction of Mr. Peter Koch- 
ely, a Dalmatian. His cook, or cooks, are French- 
men, and I think a part of the success which his 
restaurant enjoys and the greater part of the 
excellence which it reaches are due to his eagle 
eye, which detects from a distance the likes and 
dislikes of every customer. 

The trouble about small restaurants, when 
they are excellent, is, that they become well 
known, and are then so largely patronized that 
they become large and ultimately bad. 

Once I was walking in Normandy with a 
friend, and we stopped in a very small town to 
have luncheon at a hotel. We asked if there 
was any wine. Yes, there was some wine, some 



166 Round the World in 

Burgundy, some Beaune. We tried a bottle, and 
it surprised us. Surprise is, in fact, a mild word 
to describe the sharpness of our ecstasy. 

" Is not this wine very good?" we asked of the 
host. 

"Yes, sirs," he answered, "it is very good. 
It is very old, but there is not much of it left." 

Now, my friend was a journalist, who writes 
about French towns and French wines in the 
English press. 

"Whatever happens," I said to him, "if you 
write about this town and about this wine, which 
I know you will do, you must not divulge the 
name of the town." 

He agreed. He wrote an article about the 
town, he grew lyric over the wine, and looted all 
the poets of the world from Homer downwards 
for epithets and comparisons fit for it. And he 
did not mention the name of the place. 

The year after, he returned to the same place 
and ordered a bottle of the Burgundy. There 



Any Number of Days 167 

was no more left. Some English gentlemen, the 
host told him, had come on purpose from Eng- 
land to finish it. 

Now, I am sure some very intelligent man, 
and a man who was desperately fond of good 
wine, read the article, and guessed from the 
description the whereabouts of the little French 
town and the precious liquid. 

The moral of this is: " Don't tell secrets in the 
newspapers; don't even tell half a secret." 

The evening I left San Francisco, I had a small 
adventure. I asked a man the way to some street. 
He told me the way, and then, catching hold of 
my arm, he said, "You will stand me a drink." 

I said I would, and we went into a drinking- 
saloon. Then he said, " I 'm a bum. I was [and 
he stated his profession], and I 've been fixed. 
I'm a booze-fighter." He added with engaging 
frankness that he was half drunk. 

In the course of conversation, it turned out 
that we had a common friend, and had I not been 



168 Round the World in 

going off on the train, I would have taken him 
off to supper. 

A singular proof of the smallness of the world. 

Before taking leave of San Francisco, however, 
I want to say a word or two more. First of all 
about the clubs. 

To a man who is used to the staid silence of 
London clubs, American clubs are exhilarating. 
I was present, for instance, at a dinner at the 
Bohemian Club, the "High Jinks Dinner," 
which takes place once a year. Every year the 
members of the club camp out in the redwood 
region, where the enormous trees grow which 
you see in pictures, and there, in an amphi- 
theatre formed by these vast topless trunks, they 
give an open-air opera, written, composed, and 
played by themselves. Later on, when they come 
back to the city, they give a dinner in the club, 
followed by a theatrical entertainment, which is 
a burlesque on the opera given in the camp : also 
written, composed, and played by themselves. 



Any Number of Days 169 

It was at this dinner I was present, and spon- 
taneous gaiety bubbled from that entertain- 
ment like champagne out of a bottle. 

There was champagne in the concrete also, 
as well as in the abstract. But the gaiety was 
more spontaneous and more infectious than 
I have seen at any, even Bohemian, club in Lon- 
don. I fancy that San Francisco some day will 
be the great pleasure city of the world : the meet- 
ing-place of East and West, owing to its situa- 
tion, its incomparable climate, its beautiful 
surroundings, and the microbe of gaiety which 
is in the air of the place. And then San Fran- 
cisco is the golden gate which opens on to the 
enchanted realms of the Pacific. 

I travelled to New York on the Santa Fe Line, 
meaning to stop and see the Grand Canon, but, 
as it turned out, I had to go right on to Chi- 
cago. 

Writers of American impressions generally 
deliver themselves of a solemn verdict on the 



170 Round the World in 

trains, the sleeping-car accommodations, and 
their merits and demerits. 

"You won't like the sleeping-berths," said 
an American to me, before I started; "no Eng- 
lishman ever does." 

When I got on to the Pullman car, I found it 
was quite different from what I had imagined. I 
thought the berths would be stretched horizon- 
tally three quarters of the way across the car. 
The fact of their being placed sideways gives the 
sleeper a much broader berth than he has on 
European trains. 

But I will discuss this presently. 

There is one feature on American trains which 
is very different from anything in England and 
Europe — the attitude of the conductors. In 
England, and in most European countries, the 
conductor hovers round you for a tip. In America 
the conductor is an independent citizen; but 
I found him a singularly kind-hearted one. 

I wanted to send a telegram to Chicago. He 



Any Number of Days 171 

did it for me. He "dead-headed" it. He found 
out everything I wanted to know. He was my 
guide, philosopher, and friend on my way to 
Chicago. 

There is something very attractive about 
this warm-hearted human kindness which one 
meets with in America, and something very 
refreshing in the absence of servility. 

It makes one breathe deep from his lungs to 
be among people who treat you as an equal, and 
expect to be treated as an equal by you. 

There are some countries which profess de- 
mocracy, where, under the pretence of treating 
you as an equal, the inhabitants take pains to 
treat you as an inferior, but this is not so in 
America. 

Somebody — a historian, I believe — said that 
in the far future America and Russia would 
carry everything before them, owing to their 
driving power, which came from a fundamental 
kindness of heart. I believe this to be true. 



172 Round the World 

Russia and America are the two most hospitable 
countries I have ever visited. I think the Rus- 
sians and the Americans are the kindest people 
in the world, and their countries the most really 
democratic (whatever their respective govern- 
ments may be). 

I spent only a few hours at Chicago, where I 
wandered like an ant among the gigantic build- 
ings; then I went right on to New York, along 
the beautiful Hudson River, all glorious in the 
October tints of its woods and foliage, and then 
I reached New York. 

After my first two days in New York, I felt 
as the Queen of Sheba felt after she had been 
shown over King Solomon's private residence: 
there was no spirit in me. The place took my 
breath away, and I have n't yet got it back, but 
of that later. 



New York: October 

"The difference between New York and Lon- 
don," a man once said to me, "is this: in New 
York, if you have a new idea, you can get it 
carried out at once; in London, if you have a new 
idea, you are up against a brick wall." 

I believe this to be true. People in New York, 
and in America in general, are not afraid of new 
ideas, nor, indeed, of anything new. They are 
not afraid of the future. In England, if a man 
finds, for instance, that his profession is uncon- 
genial to him, however certain he may be of the 
impossibility of his making a success of it, he will 
none the less very rarely give it up and try his 
hand at something else. The future alarms him. 
In America a man will think nothing of throw- 
ing up his profession twenty times running, until 
he finds something which does suit him. 

I think the cause of this particular difference 
lies in the climate of America, and especially in 



174 Round the World in 

the climate of New York. Just as the climate of 
some places fills the whole system with an invin- 
cible desire to do nothing, with an insuperable 
languor and sloth, in the same way the climate 
of New York fills the body and mind with the 
desire to be up and about. It is the nimble air 
which produces the nimble wits: the stimulating 
atmosphere which creates, in the denizen of New 
York, the love of bustle, hurry, competition, and 
work. I am not saying this is either a good thing 
or a bad thing — I am merely noting and record- 
ing what struck me as being the main differences 
between New York and London. London, com- 
pared with certain cities, say Constantinople or 
Seville, seems a whirlpool of energy; compared 
with New York, it is slack. Compared with New 
Yorkers, Londoners are slackers. They go to 
bed earlier, they get up later, they do infinitely 
less during the day, and they do it more slowly. 
They waste more time. On the other hand, they 
suffer less from "nerve trouble.'- They do not 



Any Number of Days 175 

live on their nerves. In New York the people do. 
Very often, when you talk to some one who is 
employed, say in a store, in New York, you feel 
as if he was so highly strung as to be on the 
verge of breaking down; another turn of the 
screw and you feel he would break down. You 
never feel this in talking to a Londoner. In talk- 
ing to a Londoner, you often want to give him 
a dose of H. G. Wells's "accelerator," the medi- 
cine which makes you live more quickly. In talk- 
ing to a New Yorker, you often think he would 
be the better for a dose of some patent procras- 
tinator, which would have the effect of making 
the wheels of his physical and mental machinery 
work slower. 

A street boy, a child, in New York, is more 
nimble-minded, more agile in thought and ex- 
pression, than the quickest-witted Englishman. 
He will have got there and be walking round him 
in thought before the Englishman has begun to 
express himself. I was much struck by the pa- 



1 7 6 Round the World in 

tience and tolerance shown to me by lift-boys and 
other children in dealing with some one so much 
heavier-witted and sluggish-minded than them- 
selves, especially when one began cumbrously 
to explain something they had already under- 
stood some minutes before. 

Does all this lead to a waste of energy, like a 
lot of soda-water bottles bursting their stoppers 
and fizzing into space? I don't know. It cer- 
tainly leads to nervous breakdowns and nervous 
strain in general. The air in New York acts like 
a constant pick-me-up and enables you to do 
tiring things all day without making you feel 
tired. But some day or other you have, I sup- 
pose, to pay for this. 

So much for the air and the atmosphere of 
New York — a delicious air to the newcomer ; 
in any case, a tingling, stimulating, intoxicating 
atmosphere to the stranger; and air, as people 
say, like champagne. That depends, however, 
on what kind of champagne. It is not true to say 



Any Number of Days 177 

that all champagne is good. All port may be 
good, but all champagne is not. 

I have already said something about New 
York architecture; but I forget what. I have not 
got the back part of my manuscript here. In any 
case, whatever I said, I know that I expressed 
admiration. When one sees a fine piece of mod- 
ern architecture anywhere, one says, as a rule, it 
is very fine for a modern thing. Now one does 
not in the least feel tempted to say any such 
thing about the Pennsylvania Railroad Station 
or Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan's library. One feels — 
at least I feel — that whenever and wherever these 
two masterpieces had been made, they would 
legitimately have been ranked with the world's 
best. Had Pheidias designed the Pennsylvania 
Railway Station, he might have been proud. 
By the way, Pheidias was n't an architect, but 
only a decorator; well, let us say the best great 
architect of the best period, whoever he was. 
The striking thing about these buildings is, to 



178 Round the World in 

my mind, the fact that they are modern, but 
untainted with the influence of that horrible 
thing called "art nouveau," "modern style," 
and various other names. A style which, by 
the way, is German. It was born in Munich. 
Its parent on the male side was Japanese, on the 
female side a bastard descendant of William 
Morris via Maple. It was brought up in Ger- 
many, fostered by what are called decadent 
artists. These are artists whose work is a mix- 
ture of beer and sausage and Aubrey Beardsley. 
This style spread with incredible rapidity all 
over Germany and reached and flooded Russia, 
from Moscow to Harbin, and from St. Peters- 
burg to Odessa. In Moscow it has produced huge 
shops, in St. Petersburg likewise. The result is 
not pleasing. It is full of useless details: orna- 
ments which have no sense, curves and twiddles 
which have no meaning. This brings me to what 
I believe is the secret of the beauty of modern 
American architecture. It is, I believe, the ab- 



Any Number of Days 179 

sence of twiddles. By twiddles I mean any kind 
of unnecessary line, curve, moulding, arabesque, 
or ornament. If you ever have had any dealings 
with an English architect, you will know that 
when he brings you his plan, whether for the 
outside or the inside of a house, it will be full of 
twiddles. If you protest — if, for instance, you 
say you consider seven mouldings underneath 
the cornice on the ceiling to be too much — he 
will say it is necessary in order to break the line. 
This is n't true. Because the architects of an- 
cient times did not find it necessary to "break 
the line" in this manner, nor do the architects 
of modern America. But that they do not is 
a very remarkable fact indeed. It is probably 
unique in the modern world, and the result of 
it is magnificent architecture. 

American architecture is good because it is 
based on common sense. The worst kind of archi- 
tecture is that which is based on nonsense. By 
nonsense I mean non-sense, the contrary of 



180 Round the World in 

sense. The kind of architecture which puts in a 
room a staircase which goes nowhere is non-sense. 
All the finest architecture in the world was made 
for a definite purpose and use, and made to suit 
that purpose and use. The pyramids of Egypt 
had a use; the only thing is, nobody knows now 
what it was, but it was something very definite ; 
of that we can be certain from the enormous 
care which was taken to build them in accordance 
with certain mathematical calculations and ac- 
cording to a certain disposition and conjunction 
of the'stars, the latitude, and the longitude. The 
idea that they were simply tombs is, I believe, 
difficult to support. But whatever the purpose 
was, we can be certain they had a purpose. They 
were not simply staircases leading nowhere. Now 
the Pennsylvania Railway Station is a railway 
station, and the architecture is subordinate to 
its use. The result is magnificent. Nothing would 
have been added to its use had it been filled with 
absurd lines and curves, twisted flowers, impos- 



Any Number of Days 181 

sible fruits and silly claws; and nothing would 
have been added to its beauty. 

Then there are the skyscrapers. These are 
obviously useful, since the narrowness of the 
area in which New York is built makes it, if not 
necessary, at least highly desirable to economize 
as much space as possible, and since it is impos- 
sible to build broadly, the only way to acquire 
houseroom is to build skyward. And this has 
been done, again without the addition on the 
face of the buildings of a lot of unnecessary ex- 
crescences and ornaments. Mr. Pennell, who is 
an artist of fame, says that the sight of the sky- 
scraper, from the seas, beats Venice. I don't 
care two pins for comparisons, for what seems 
to me amusing and appreciable is that we live 
in a world so rich in invention and so various 
that it produces and contains things so striking 
and so different as Venice and the skyscrapers 
of New York. That 's what we ought to be thank- 
ful for. Another useful thing which seems to me 



182 Round the Wound in 

to result in a spectacle of amazing beauty is 
the illuminated advertisements on Broadway at 
night. There, by their quantity and their quality, 
they compose a fairy city which is constantly 
changing — a city of stars, glow-worms, fire- 
flies, and Roman candles. Just the right thing to 
light up a street which is almost exclusively 
devoted, at night, to theatres, restaurants, and 
places of amusement. 

Is America comfortable? I have already said 
something about the trains; but since writing 
that I have been for two long journeys in the 
Orient Express. I suppose the Orient Express 
professes to represent and embody the acme of 
human luxury in the way of European travelling. 
It certainly represents, to my mind, the acme 
of human discomfort. The train is narrow. It 
shakes. The restaurant car is too small, and the 
food has a peculiar nauseating quality which 
is the special and exclusive invention and prop- 
erty of the International Sleeping-Car Company. 



Any Number of Days 183 

The curious thing is that the food is the same 
on whatever line you travel, so long as the res- 
taurant car belongs to the International Sleep- 
ing-Car Company. It does not matter if you 
are travelling on the Nord Express, the Sud 
Express, or the Orient Express, you will get 
exactly the same dinner, and that same dinner 
will have the same taste — that unique taste 
you find nowhere else in the world. And, what 
is more, if you ever feed at one of the hotels be- 
longing to the International Sleeping-Car Com- 
pany, you will even there find the same meal and 
the same taste to it, the same taste pervading 
all the dishes — a peculiar kind of staleness, 
something slightly rancid and altogether unap- 
petizing. One wonders who invented it and by 
what manner and means it was made universal. 
On the Trans-Siberian Railway, which goes from 
Moscow to Vladivostok, on certain days of the 
week there is a dining-car belonging to the Inter- 
national Sleeping-Car Company, and on other 



184 Round the World in 

days there is a dining-car belonging to the State. 
In the car belonging to the State you get good, 
ordinary food ; the same kind of food as you can 
get at a hotel or a station buffet; but in the Inter- 
national Sleeping-Car Company's dining-car you 
get the same old meal and the same old taste. 
When I last travelled on the Orient Express, 
I was thinking the whole time, which is the 
most comfortable or the most uncomfortable, 
that or an American train. And I made the 
following schedule of advantages and disadvant- 
ages. 

Advantages of the Orient Express over an 
American express train : — 

(1) You have a compartment to yourself or, 
at the worst, shared with one other. 

(2) You can smoke where you like. 

(3) You have a washing-place opening off of 
your compartment. 

Advantages of the American express over the 
Orient Express : — 




UNDRESSING IN THE BERTH OF AN AMERICAN CAR IS AN 
ACROBATIC FEAT 



Any Number of Days 185 

(1) Your bed, when you are once in it, is much 
broader and more comfortable. 

(2) The food is incomparably better. 

(3) There is a constant supply of iced water 
within reach. 

Disadvantages of the Orient Express : — 

(1) The bed is narrow. A hard pillow is put 
under the mattress so that it catches you 
in the small of the back. If you take it 
away, your head sinks into a draughty 
hole between the wall and the mattress. 
The blanket is folded double, so that it is 
impossible to cover yourself or the bed 
with it entirely. If you unfold it and use 
it single it is too thin to protect you from 
the cold. 

(2) You can smoke in your compartment, it 
is true, but if you want for a change to 
smoke in the smoking compartment, you 
will find the accommodations insufficient 
and unsatisfactory. 



186 Round the World in 

(3) There is no supply of newspapers. 
Disadvantages of an American express: — 

(1) You have to wash in public. Passengers 
often use the washing-room as smoking- 
room in the morning and sit in it smoking 
cigars, while you have to shave. Some 
people find it quite impossible to shave 
in public. Shaving even in private makes 
them nervous, but shaving in public is for 
them a positive impossibility. 

(2) Undressing in the berth of an American 
car is an acrobatic feat. 

(3) You are at the mercy of the coloured man 
who looks after you. Either he bullies you 
or he does n't; but if he does n't he is gen- 
erally slack and does n't look after you 
and your things. He makes up for ineffi- 
ciency by an exaggerated familiarity. 

There — that seems to me to be a very im- 
partial schedule — the conclusion being that 
travelling on the Orient Express or on an 



Any Number of Days 187 

American express is equally uncomfortable. 
The truth is that all railway travelling is very 
uncomfortable anyhow. As Mr. H. G. Wells 
printed somewhere, railway travelling has n't 
really improved since the first trains were in- 
vented. The same essentials of discomfort re- 
main: the narrowness, the dirt, the stuffiness, 
the vibration of the car. The car has not im- 
proved. The Pullman car is a more ingenious 
arrangement than the European car for the train, 
but it is not more comfortable for the passen- 
ger. What surprises me now is the things I re- 
member Americans telling me about American 
trains before I went to America. I remember 
being told by them that American trains were 
full of hot and cold baths, which you could jump 
into at any minute ; that there was no difference 
in being on a train or in a club ; that they were 
more comfortable than the best hotel and more 
luxurious than the fastest liners; that the best 
European cars would be considered to belong 



188 Round the World in 

to the fourth class in America. How different 
this is from what I have heard Americans say 
about American trains when they were them- 
selves on the train in America! 

With regard to baggage, I throw a large bou- 
quet at the check system. It is infinitely more 
convenient than the European system, which 
I do not think has a single advantage, except 
the doubtful one of its being easier for you to 
lose your boxes. In England, for instance, there 
is a special profession to which certain people 
belong who are called "Peter-claimers," and 
whose whole business in life is to steal other peo- 
ple's baggage from railway stations. They drive 
to the station with an empty bag or with a bag 
full of stones. They put down their bag next 
to that of a banker, which they know to be full 
of gold, or next to that of a duchess, which they 
know to be full of pearls, rubies, and pink to- 
pazes. Then in their hurry they make a mistake, 
and, leaving their bag, they take away that of 




y» 



Any Number of Days 189 

the banker or the duchess and drive home with 
it and never give it back, unless the reward 
offered be larger than the value of the contents 
of the bag and no questions be asked. This is 
called "Peter-claiming." 

Another and more complicated way of doing 
it is this: You — the crook — that is to say, the 
" Peter-claimer " — have a particular kind of 
bag made which when placed on the top of any 
other kind of bag opens and swallows it up. I 
don't see how " Peter-claimers " could possibly 
do their work in a country where the check 
system prevails. However, human ingenuity 
is boundless, and doubtless a way would be 
found. 

An American said to me, when I was travelling 
not long ago, that in America matters such as 
travelling, living in hotels, etc., had been reduced 
to perfection. I don't believe this to be true. 
What I do think is very often true is that the 
means has been perfected without any regard 



190 Round the World in 

having been paid to the end. The Pullman car 
is an example in point. If you regard the Pull- 
man car as a device for travelling, a machine 
for holding as many people as possible and econo- 
mizing the maximum of space in so doing, it is 
perfect. But as a vehicle for human beings to 
travel in in comfort it is imperfect. It contains 
great possibilities for discomfort quite apart 
from the coloured gentleman, who may or may 
not make life a hell to you during the journey. 
What is often left out in the calculations of in- 
genious devices of means of luxury is the human 
element, the human being. It is no good having 
an elevator that goes at a speed of five hundred 
miles an hour, if it makes you sick. It is no good 
having a train that goes so fast that you can 
neither read by day nor sleep by night in it. It 
is no good having a theatre so large that you 
cannot hear the actors speak. It is no good hav- 
ing a meal so rich that your appetite has gone 
after the first course. 



Any Number of Days 191 

I remember somebody once saying to me a 
long time ago that the Americans had attained 
to luxury by jumping over comfort. I think 
there is a certain amount of truth in this, and 
yet it would be foolish to call American hotels 
uncomfortable. They are not uncomfortable. 
Only there is this to be said : That to some people 
all hotel life is uncomfortable. They hate living 
in a crowd. They hate bustle, confusion, noise, 
the arrival and departure of people, etc. And 
there is certainly more hotel life in America than 
in other countries. And yet what a saving to 
the nerves, and to the temper, are so many of 
the devices and the arrangments in American 
hotels. The telephone, for instance: if you want 
a nice test of temper, try to get a number at the 
Hotel Cecil in London; or, better still, spend a 
happy morning in ringing up people on the tele- 
phone in Paris. In America it is either done for 
you at once or you know it cannot be done, 
and the matter is settled. Hotel life in America 



192 Round the World in 

seems to me infinitely better organized than in 
any other country in the world, with the possible 
exception of China. Because when you order a 
room at a Chinese hotel, in a small Chinese town, 
the room is built for you while you wait; you 
choose the style of room, and the paper, the car- 
peting, and all the furniture are put in during 
the day. 

Another thing which is an immense saving 
of time and temper in an American hotel is the 
way in which it is possible to find out whether 
or not some friend of yours is staying there, 
without having to wait the best part of an hour, 
and without people being sent off in different 
directions, who come back much later on with 
contradictory reports. 

If, though, on the one hand, in anything that 
concerns machinery contrivance, organization 
is better in America than elsewhere, anything 
that concerns the personal service of human 
beings is probably less good, owing to the simple 




TRYING TO GET A NUMBER AT THE HOTEL CECIL 



Any Number of Days 193 

fact that there is no servant class in America; 
that servants in America are either coloured men 
or foreigners. This is a factor which makes for 
discomfort, because the existence of a great mass 
of human beings who have nothing else to do 
but attend to the wants of other human beings, 
obviously conduces to the comfort of those peo- 
ple whose wants are being attended to. For in- 
stance, it is more comfortable to arrive at a rail- 
way station in Russia, where there are about 
twenty willing railway porters to every traveller, 
than it is to arrive at 4 A.M., in Paris, where there 
is only one unwilling and extremely rude porter 
to attend to all the travellers. It is obviously 
more comfortable to be certain of finding some 
one to carry a heavy bag for you, if you are going 
into the suburbs by rail, than to be certain that 
you will have to carry it yourself. On the other 
hand, the absence of a servant class speaks well 
for the spirit of independence and initiative in 
the country. At least I suppose it does. Equality 



194 Round the World in 

is a good thing, but it can be abused just as much 
as its brother, liberty. 

We all know the acts of tyranny which have 
been committed, and are committed daily, in 
the name of liberty. In the same way crime and 
misdemeanors are committed in the name of 
equality. In order to show you that he is as good 
as his master, Jack often treats his master as 
his inferior. 

If I had to compare the comforts of life in 
England and America, and to sum up the matter 
briefly, I should say as far as life in public is con- 
cerned — that is to say, life in hotels, restau- 
rants, clubs, and, perhaps, trains (in England the 
distances being short, the proposition is hardly 
the same), and certainly railway stations and 
buffets and all kinds of bars — everything you 
get in America is superior, but as far as life in 
private is concerned — country houses, cot- 
tages, farms, town houses, flats, and rooms — 
the comfort in England is incomparably greater. 



Any Number of Days 195 

Of course some people say that life in private — 
home life — does not exist in America at all. 
But that is the kind of generalization I dis- 
trust. Personally I think a small private house 
in England is a much more comfortable affair 
than a small private house in America. On the 
other hand, I think an American bar is much 
more comfortable and cheerful than our English 
public house. Again, I think there is a great 
difference between the English country house, 
owned by the English rich, and that owned in 
England by the American rich. In the homes 
of the American rich you will rarely find a 
room in which it is possible to sit down with 
comfort. 

American clubs, again, are far more human 
and cheerful than English clubs. Anything more 
depressing than the average English club can 
scarcely be imagined : a series of rooms in which 
old men in different corners grunt, frown, and 
snore — the rest is silence. In American clubs 



196 Round the World in 

you feel that everybody is alive and that people 
go to clubs not to avoid the society of their fel- 
low creatures, but, on the contrary, to enjoy it. 
And that, after all, was the origin and the initial 
purpose of all clubs, because if a man wants soli- 
tude he can stop at home. But I forgot — some 
men are married. That, of course, certainly 
changes the question. 

In the category of human comforts belongs 
the food question. I don't suppose it is necessary 
at this time of the day to sing the praises of the 
food you get in America. America has a national 
food, containing a quantity of delicious dishes 
you can get only in America, and Americans 
are, thank heavens, not unconscious of the fact. 
England has a national food also; but, alas! 
how rarely you get English food, good English 
food, in England, and how often you get a shock- 
ingly bad imitation of French food — a succes- 
sion of entrees which a wit once said were like 
tepid lawn-tennis balls. How excellent a thing, 



Any Number of Days 197 

on the other hand, is a fried sole, toasted cheese 
(like that you get at the " Cheshire Cheese"), 
English cold beef, English bacon, roast grouse, 
and currant-and-raspberry tart. These are all 
things which I believe you can get nowhere out 
of England; nowhere meat at such a peculiar 
pitch of perfection. 

,There was once upon a time an English states- 
man (it was either Lord Melbourne or Lord 
Palmerston) who asked a schoolboy what his 
ideal luncheon would be. The boy thought for 
a long time and said, "Roast duck, with peas 
and new potatoes, and then some raspberry -and- 
black-currant tart." And the statesman, struck 
by the extraordinary wisdom of the reply, pro- 
phesied a great future for the boy, who was none 
other than — well, I quite forget. But it was 
not Winston Churchill. 

It is on record, I believe, that Macaulay gave 
a house-warming dinner to two friends in Albany, 
and after expending much thought and all the 



198 Round the World in 

resources of his immense erudition on the sub- 
ject, came to the conclusion that the following 
would be the ideal menu for the occasion. The 
season was autumn. 

Mulligatawny Soup 
Broiled Turbot 
Roast Partridge 
Toasted Cheese 

I once asked a Frenchman who, at the time, 
was supposed to have, and rightly, the best cook 
in Paris, where and what was the best dinner he 
had ever had. He said the best dinner he had 
ever had was in a small country house in Eng- 
land and had consisted of a fried sole and roast 
grouse. 

If I were Emperor of Rome, and had at my 
disposal the manual labor of ancient Rome, the 
skilled cooks of all nations, and the railway serv- 
ice of the world, and if I liked to give a perfect 
dinner, I should arrange it thus. 



Any Number of Days 199 

The season is, let us say, autumn or winter. 

A cocktail made by an American 

Hors d'ceuvre, consisting of 

fresh caviare from Russia, prawns from Seville 

Oysters: Blue Points 

Soup : Bortsch, made by a peasant of Little Russia 

Cold lobster 

Whitebait 

Veau a la bourgeoise, cooked by a 

Frenchwoman from a farm 

Roast grouse — Corn on the cob 

Salad, made by a Frenchman 

Marrow bones 

Toasted cheese 

A German apple tart 

Mince pies — Indigestion 

That is, perhaps, enough about food and the 
comforts of life. However the comforts of life 
in America may stand with regard to those in 
other countries, they are in America very re- 
markable, very characteristic, and worthy of 
study and still more of experience. 

THE END 



CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS 
U . S . A 



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